THE FALL OF MAN AND THE FOUNDATIONS OF SCIENCE
PETER HARRISON
University of Oxford
For Grace
We desire truth, and find within ourselves only uncertainty….
This desire is left to us, partly to punish us, partly to make us perceive from whence we
have fallen.
Blaise Pascal, Pensées, §401
Contents
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
ABBREVIATIONS
INTRODUCTION
1. THE FIRST PHILOSOPHER
Adam’s Encyclopaedia
Falling into Ignorance
Inheriting Error
Carnal Knowledge & the Divine Light
Baptising Aristotle
2. AUGUSTINE REVIVED
Luther & the Putrid Philosopher
Depravity & Doubt
Augustinus
The Sceptical Hypothesis
3. SEEKING CERTAINTY IN A FALLEN WORLD
Vestiges of Heavenly Light
Mathematical Certainties?
Adam, Moses, Hermes, Solomon
Inspiration, Experience & Experiment
4. DETHRONING THE IDOLS
Science and Self-Knowledge
The Dominion of Mind
The Fallen Body
Idols of the Mind
5. THE INSTAURATION OF LEARNING
1
18
55
96
148
197
‘Knowledge shall be Increased’
Reversing Babel
Solomon’s House
The Limits of Reason
Anthropology Abandoned
CONCLUSION
258
REFERENCES
271
Abbreviations
ANF
AT
BJHS
CHMP
CHLMP
CHRP
CSM
FaCh
JHI
LW
NPNF I
NPNF II
PG
PL
SCG
ST
The Ante-Nicene Fathers, 9 vols. (Edinburgh, 1990)
Oeuvres de Descartes, 13 vols., ed. Charles Adam and Paul Tannery
(Paris, 1897-1913)
British Journal for the History of Science
The Cambridge History of Later Greek and Early Medieval Philosophy,
ed. A. H. Armstrong (Cambridge, 1970)
The Cambridge History of Later Medieval Philosophy, ed. Norman
Kretzmann, Anthony Kenny, and Jan Pinborg (Cambridge, 1982).
The Cambridge History of Renaissance Philosophy, ed. Charles B. Schmitt
and Quentin Skinner (Cambridge, 1988)
The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, 2 vols., tr. John Cottingham,
Robert Stoothoff, and Dugald Murdoch (Cambridge, 1985)
Fathers of the Church, Washington DC., 1932Journal of the History of Ideas
Luther’s Works, 55 vols., ed. Jaroslav Pelikan and Helmut Lehmann
(Philadelphia, 1957)
Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Series I, 14 vols., ed. Philip Schaff and
Henry Wace (Peabody, MA,1994)
Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Series II, 14 vols., ed. Philip Schaff and
Henry Wace (Peabody, MA,1994)
Patrologiae cursus completus, Series Graeca, 162 vols., ed. Jacques-Paul
Migne (Paris, 1857-1912)
Patrologiae cursus completus, Series Latina, 217 vols., ed. Jacques-Paul
Migne (Paris, 1844-1905)
Thomas Aquinas, Summa contra gentiles, tr. English Dominican Fathers
(New York, 1924)
Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae, Blackfriars edn., (London, 1964-76)
INTRODUCTION
He came into the World a Philosopher, which sufficiently appeared by his
writing the Nature of things upon their Names: he could view Essences in
themselves, and read Forms with the comment of their respective Properties; he
could see Consequents yet dormant in their principles, and effects yet unborn in
the Womb of their Causes; his understanding could almost pierce into future
contingents, his conjectures improving even to Prophesy, or the certainties of
Prediction; till his fall it was ignorant of nothing but of Sin, or at least rested in
the notion without the smart of Experiment…. I confess ‘tis difficult for us who
date our ignorance from our first Being, & were still bred up with the same
infirmities about us, with which we were born, to raise our thoughts, and
imaginations to those intellectual perfections that attended our nature in its time
of Innocence….1
These effusive estimates of Adam’s abilities were delivered by Robert South in a
sermon to worshippers at St Paul’s Cathedral, London on a Sunday morning in
November 1662. While this description of Adam’s philosophical acumen was notable
for its eloquence—South was widely acknowledged as the most gifted preacher of his
generation—there was nothing unusual in its substance. From quite early in the
Christian era, patristic writers had commented on the unique intellectual capacities of
our first father, on the vast extent of his knowledge, and on the magnitude of his losses
at the Fall. These ideas were further elaborated during the Middle Ages and were
commonplace in the Early Modern period. For many champions of the new learning in
the seventeenth century the encyclopaedic knowledge of Adam was the benchmark
against which their own aspirations were gauged. Francis Bacon’s project to reform
philosophy was motivated by an attempt to determine whether the human mind ‘might
INTRODUCTION
2
by any means be restored to its perfect and original condition, or if that may not be, yet
reduced to a better condition than that in which it now is.’2 In 1662, the year in which
South delivered his sermon, Bacon’s intellectual heirs formed the Royal Society, the
goals of which were also expressed by the apologist for the Society, Thomas Sprat, in
terms of a regaining of the knowledge that Adam had once possessed.3
Such sanguine expectations, it must be said, were not shared by all. Robert South
himself, while clearly impressed by the scope of Adam’s original knowledge,
entertained serious doubts about the prospects for its contemporary recovery, and he
could be scathing of those who cherished such proud ambitions. In his capacity as the
Public Orator at Oxford, he had presided at the opening of the Sheldonian theatre in
1669. In a long speech on that occasion he had observed that Fellows of the fledgling
Royal Society ‘can admire nothing except fleas, lice, and themselves’, no doubt causing
acute embarrassment to the Fellows present, including Christopher Wren, architect of
the theatre. South’s reservations about the programme of the Royal Society were owing
to his scepticism about the extent to which Adamic knowledge could be re-established
in the modern age and to his concerns about the links between such projects and a
discredited puritan utopianism. Indeed one of the major themes of South’s sermon was
the vast disparity between the ease with which Adam had acquired knowledge and the
difficulties encountered by his latter-day progeny: ‘Study was not then a Duty, nightwatchings were needless; the light of Reason wanted not the assistance of a Candle.’
For Adam’s fallen issue, however, it was a very different matter: ‘This is the doom of
faln man to labour in the fire, to seek truth in profundo, to exhaust his time and impair
his health, and perhaps to spin out his dayes, and himself into one pittiful, controverted,
Conclusion.’4 Adam’s knowledge, on this more sober account, would not be easily
reacquired. Yet, whatever the differences between South and the Fellows of the Royal
Society, it was agreed on all sides that those seeking to determine the rightful course for
the advancement of knowledge needed to reckon with Adam and what befell him as a
consequence of his sin.
1
Robert South, ‘Man was made in God’s Image’, Sermons Preached upon Several Occasions
(Oxford, 1679), pp. 127, 128.
2
Francis Bacon, The Great Instauration, in The Works of Francis Bacon, ed. James Spedding,
Robert Ellis, and Douglas Heath, 14 vols., (London, 1857-74), IV, 7.
3
Thomas Sprat, History of the Royal Society of London (London, 1667), pp. 349f. The Society
had met informally from 1660, but was officially incorporated on 15 July 1662.
4
South, Sermons, pp. 127f.
INTRODUCTION
3
The narrative of the Fall has always exercised a particular fascination over Western
minds. It has been described in recent times as ‘the anthropological myth par
excellence’, ‘the most elemental of myths’, and ‘the central myth of Western culture’.5
During the seventeenth century, this myth assumed a particular importance. At this
time, the bible came to occupy a position of unparalleled authority, informing
discussions about the nature of the state, the rights of the individual, private property,
education, international sovereignty, the status of indigenous peoples, work and leisure,
agriculture and gardening, anthropology and moral psychology. In each of these
spheres, the story of Adam had a significant place. According to historian Christopher
Hill: ‘The Fall then was central to seventeenth-century debates about the nature of the
state and its laws, as well as about the justification of private property, social inequality
and the subordination of women.’6 This was particularly so in England, where Calvinist
understandings of the doctrine of original sin predominated. It is no exaggeration to say
that this dogma dominated the theological agenda and became a crucial point of
reference in broader social and intellectual discussions.7
The central concern of this book is to illustrate the ways in which the myth of the Fall
informed discussions about the foundations of knowledge and influenced
methodological developments in the nascent natural sciences. While the first half of
the book will be devoted to making this general case, the second half will focus on the
more specific example of experimental science in seventeenth-century England. What
should become apparent from the more general discussion is that the differences
between competing strategies for the advancement of knowledge put forward during the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries can be accounted for largely in terms of different
assessments of the Fall and of its impact on the human mind. The renewed focus on the
Fall and original sin that is characteristic of the early modern period was occasioned by
the religious upheavals of the sixteenth century. These events not only precipitated a
crisis of confidence in the traditional sources of knowledge, but also coincided with a
revival of an Augustinian anthropology that emphasized the corruption of human nature
and the limitations of the intellect. Four aspects of this development will be examined.
5
Paul Ricoeur, The Symbolism of Evil (Boston, 1967), p. 281; T. Otten, After Innocence:
Visions of the Fall in Modern Literature (Pittsburg, 1982); Philip Almond, Adam and Eve in
Seventeenth-Century Thought (Cambridge, 1999), p. 1.
6
Christopher Hill, ‘Sin and Society’, The Collected Essays of Christopher Hill, 3 vols.
(Amherst, 1986), II, 117-140 (125).
7
Ibid., p. 132; W. M. Spellman, John Locke and the Problem of Depravity (Oxford, 1988), pp.
8, 9; William Poole, Milton and the Idea of the Fall (Cambridge, 2005), pp. 4f., 21-39.
INTRODUCTION
4
First, the early modern preoccupation with sin meant that in the realm of epistemology
error was often equated with sin, and the human propensity to invest false claims with
the character of truth was attributed to Adam’s fall. Considerations such as these
explain why philosophers of the seventeenth century tend to be preoccupied with error
and its prevention, and commonly assume that avoidance of error is not merely a
necessary condition for knowledge, but that it is sufficient.8 The tradition according to
which Adam was in possession of the perfect philosophy implies that human minds had
originally been designed to know the truth, and that if those impediments that arose as a
consequence of the Fall could be identified and neutralized, the mind would once again,
of its own nature, arrive at truth or at least be better equipped to do so. Francis Bacon,
as is well known, saw in the sciences the prospect of restoring, or at least repairing, the
losses to knowledge that had resulted from the Fall.9 His emphasis lay in purging the
mind of those flaws introduced by Adam’s defection. Describing his goal as ‘the true
end and termination of error’, he suggested that this could only be accomplished if
knowledge was ‘discharged of that venom which the serpent infused into it’.10 Later in
the century a number of those involved in the establishment and running of the Royal
Society set out a similar strategy. Joseph Glanvill, an early and influential fellow of the
Society, explained that knowledge could not be set on a sure foundation until a full
account had been given of the causes of ignorance: ‘And therefore besides the general
reason I gave of our intellectual disabilities, The Fall; it will be worth our labor to
descend to a more particular account: since it is a good degree of Knowledge to be
acquainted with the causes of our Ignorance.’11 Even opponents of the experimental
method of the Royal Society adopted this approach. John Sergeant, a champion of
Aristotelianism who opposed both English experimentalism and Cartesianism, observed
in his Method to Science (1696) that even the greatest minds ‘still miss of Reasoning
rightly, and so fall short of True Knowledge, which is their Natural Perfection.’ Once
again, the proposed solution involved an analysis of the primordial cause of error:
‘Whence, our First Enquiry ought to be, how Man’s Nature come to be so Disabled
from performing its Primary Operation, or from Reasoning rightly.’12
8
On the avoidance of error as sufficient for truth, see Thomas Lennon’s introduction to Nicolas
Malebranche, The Search after Truth, tr. and ed. Thomas Lennon and Paul Olscamp
(Cambridge, 1997), p. xii.
9
Bacon, Novum Organum, II.lii, Works, IV, 247-48. Cf. Valerius Terminus, Works III, 222.
10
Bacon, Great Instauration, Works, IV, 20-21.
11
Joseph Glanvill, The Vanity of Dogmatizing. or, Confidence in opinions manifested in a
discourse of the shortness and uncertainty of our knowledge, and its causes: with some
reflexions on peripateticism, and an apology for philosophy, (London, 1661), p. 63; cf. Scepsis
Scientifica, or, Confest ignorance, the way to science (London, 1665), p. 48.
12
John Sergeant, The Method to Science (London, 1696), Preface, Sig. av-a2r.
INTRODUCTION
5
This preoccupation with error and its causes was by no means the sole preserve of
English philosophers, although admittedly it was they who most enthusiastically
focused their attentions on the history of Adam. An important feature of Descartes’
programme to establish new foundations for knowledge was ‘to investigate the origin
and causes of our errors and to learn to guard against them.’13 While Descartes makes
no mention of the Fall in this context—indeed he is typically silent on matters relating
to sacred history—his compatriots were less reticent. The subtitle of Nicolas
Malebranche’s Search after Truth (1674-5) reads: ‘Wherein are treated the nature of
mans’ mind and the use he must make of it to avoid error in the sciences.’ Malebranche
went on to explain that this approach called for a specific investigation into ‘how we
might conceive the order found in the faculties and passions of our first father in his
original state, as well as the changes and disorder that befell him after his sin.’14 Blaise
Pascal went further, castigating Descartes for not having taken the Fall seriously
enough. Had he done so he might not have spoken so confidently about attaining
certain knowledge. Pascal allowed that ‘if man had never been corrupted, he would, in
his innocence, confidently enjoy both truth and felicity.’ The present situation,
however, was rather different: ‘We perceive an image of truth and possess nothing but
falsehood, being equally incapable of absolute ignorance and certain knowledge; so
obvious is it that we once enjoyed a degree of perfection from which we have unhappily
fallen.’15
For all the attention directed towards sin and error, the ultimate aim was to determine
the conditions under which knowledge would be possible and, more particularly, what
kinds of things could be known and by what methods. Writing in the Preface of
Micrographia (1665) Robert Hooke, curator of experiments at the Royal Society,
declared that ‘every man, both from a deriv'd corruption, innate and born with him, and
from his breeding and converse with men, is very subject to slip into all sorts of
errors…. These being the dangers in the process of humane Reason, the remedies of
them all can only proceed from the real, the mechanical, the experimental Philosophy.’16
Hooke’s statement neatly encapsulates the positive aspect of proposals to advance
13
Descartes, Principles of Philosophy 1, §31, CSM I, 203-4. It is also significant that one of
Spinoza’s chief criticisms of both Descartes and Bacon, was that ‘they never grasped the true
cause of error.’ Letter to Henry Oldenburg, September 1661, The Collected Works of Spinoza,
ed. and tr. Edwin Curley (Princeton, 1985) I, 167.
14
Malebranche, Search after Truth, I.5 (p. 19).
15
Blaise Pascal, Pensées, L 131, tr. A. J. Krailsheimer (London, 1966), p. 65. This edition
uses the Lafuma (L) numbering. Cf. L 45, L 199, L 401.
INTRODUCTION
6
knowledge in the seventeenth century. Having identified the specific privations
suffered by the mind on account of Adam’s lapse, an argument could be made as to how
they could be most successfully redressed by the suggested procedures. The
‘mechanical and experimental philosophy’, while it will be a major focus of this book,
was not the only solution proposed to overcome the inherent incapacity of fallen minds.
Despite a general consensus about the limitations of the intellect and the need to
overcome its deficiencies, projects to overcome these shortcomings varied considerably.
The priority accorded to proposed sources of knowledge—be it reason and innate
principles; the senses, observation, and experimentation; or divine revelation through
the scriptures or personal inspiration—were intimately related to analyses of the specific
effects of original sin. Similar considerations apply to the certitude with which various
forms of knowledge could be held.
The second aspect of the thesis of this book, then, is that the various solutions offered to
the problem of knowledge in the early modern period are closely related to assessments
of exactly what physical and cognitive depredations were suffered by the human race as
a consequence of Adam’s original infraction. If, for example, the Fall were understood
as having resulted in the triumph of the passions over reason, the restoration of Adamic
knowledge would be accomplished through re-establishing control of the passions, thus
enabling reason once again to discharge its proper function. If the Fall had dulled
Adam’s senses, this deficiency might be overcome through the use of artificial
instruments capable of restoring to weakened human senses some of their original
acuity. If the Fall had altered nature itself, rendering its operations less obvious and less
intelligible, intrusive investigative techniques would be required to make manifest what
had once been plain. Varying estimates of the severity of the Fall, moreover, gave rise
to different assessments of the prospects of a full recovery of Adam’s knowledge.
Those who regarded the Fall as a relatively minor event were generally far more
optimistic about the possibility of constructing a complete and certain science than were
those for whom the Fall was an unmitigated catastrophe. As will become apparent, the
contrasting experimental, speculative, and illuminative solutions to the early modern
problem of knowledge were informed by varying conceptions of the nature and severity
of the Fall. To express it in more familiar (but historically more problematic) terms,
advocates of ‘rationalism’ and ‘empiricism’ largely fall out along lines related to an
underlying theological anthropology. Descartes’ confident assertion that the ‘natural
light’ of reason could provide the basis of complete and certain science presupposed the
16
Robert Hooke, Micrographia (London, 1665), Preface.
INTRODUCTION
7
persistence of the natural light and the divine image even in fallen human beings. This
was strongly contested by those who believed that the Fall had effaced the divine image
and all but extinguished the natural light. On this latter view, if knowledge were
possible at all, it would be painstakingly accumulated through much labour, through
trials and the testing of nature, and would give rise to a modest knowledge that did not
penetrate to the essences of things and was at best probable rather than certain. Such
mitigated scepticism characterised the experimental approach commonly associated
with such figures as Francis Bacon and Robert Boyle.
The third element of this argument concerns the religious background of these early
modern discussions of the Fall and its impact on knowledge. One event that led to a
renewed interest in the human condition and its inherent fallibility was the Protestant
reformation and the resurgence of Augustinian thought that accompanied it. The
reformers’ focus on human depravity, originally articulated in the context of a particular
view of justification, was also to set the agenda for the epistemological debates of the
following two centuries. In general, those influenced by the anthropology of Luther
and Calvin were to adopt the position of mitigated scepticism characteristic of
empiricism and the experimental philosophy. Those who took a more positive view of
human nature were more inclined to assert the reliability of the human reason, the
possibility of a priori knowledge, and the perfectibility of the sciences. To a degree,
then, the methodological prescriptions offered by philosophers in the seventeenth
century mirror their confessional allegiances. Hence, the Catholic Descartes held fast to
a relatively optimistic Thomist account of human nature and aspired to attain, in his own
words, a ‘perfect knowledge of all things that mankind is capable of knowing’.17 By
way of contrast, Francis Bacon, raised as he was in a Calvinist environment, thought
that knowledge would be accumulated gradually and only with meticulous care. The
work of many unexceptional minds, science would ultimately amount to ‘judgment and
opinion, not knowledge and certainty’, as John Locke would later express it.18 These
confessional correlations are, admittedly, far from perfect, partly because of the
emergence of a Protestant scholasticism that reverted to the optimistic
Thomist/Aristotelian view of knowledge and human nature, and partly because early
modern Catholicism witnessed its own Augustinian revival, most conspicuously in the
Jansenist movement that exercised such a profound influence over Blaise Pascal and
Antoine Arnauld. Nevertheless, it is possible to establish significant links between
17
Descartes, Principles, CSM I, 179.
INTRODUCTION
8
particular thinkers’ commitments in the sphere of theological anthropology and their
methodological prescriptions in the realm of the sciences.
Finally, and following directly from the previous point, the trajectories of the major
philosophical projects of the seventeenth centuries can be understood to some extent as
developments of different aspects of Augustinianism. While Augustine’s influence on
early modern philosophy has long been taken for granted by French authors,
Anglophone writers are now increasingly aware of the significance of aspects of
Augustine’s thought for this period.19 In keeping with the received version of the
history of philosophy, according to which the chief concern of modern philosophy is
epistemology, Augustine’s theories of knowledge have been the primary focus of
attention. Accordingly, Augustine is seen to have had most impact in the rationalist
epistemologies of Descartes and Malebranche. While not wishing to deny the
significance of this line of investigation, I shall trace an alternative avenue of
Augustinian influence in the early modern period, namely, his views on human nature
and his doctrine of original sin. While these are not unrelated to his epistemological
views, Augustine’s understanding of the Fall and original sin, as already indicated, was
to play a vital role in traditions of investigation rather different from that of the
Cartesians. The experimental approach, I shall argue, was deeply indebted to
Augustinian views about the limitations of human knowledge in the wake of the Fall,
and thus inductive experimentalism can also lay claim to a filial relationship with the
tradition of Augustinianism. In much the same way that both Protestantism and early
modern Catholicism can quite legitimately be regarded as heirs of Augustine, so too,
can both of the chief sects of seventeenth-century philosophy.
The claims set out in this book represent a significant challenge to some common
assumptions about the origins of modern philosophy and science, and about the onset of
modernity generally. At this point it is worth giving a preliminary indication of where
18
John Locke, Essay concerning Human Understanding IV.xii.10, 2 vols., ed. A. C. Fraser
(New York, 1959), II, 349.
19
See, e.g., Etienne Gilson, ‘The Future of Augustinian Metaphysics’ in A Monument to St.
Augustine (London, 1934); Jean Laporte, Le coeur et al raison selon Pascal (Paris, 1950); Jean
Delumeau, Le Péché et al peur: La culpabilisation en Occident XIIIe-XVIIIe siècles (Paris,
1983); G. B. Matthews, Thought’s Ego in Augustine and Descartes (Ithaca, 1992); ‘Postmedieval Augustinianism’, in The Cambridge Companion to Augustine, ed. Eleonore Stump and
Norman Kretzmann (Cambridge, 2001), pp. 267-79; Stephen Menn, Descartes and Augustine
(Cambridge, 1998); Zbigniew Janowski, Cartesian Theodicy (Dordrecht, 2000); Michael
Moriarty, Early Modern French Thought (Oxford, 2003), pp. 41-9 and passim. See also LouisPaul Du Vaucel, ‘Observations sur la philosophie de Descartes’, in Descartes et el
Cartésianisme Hollandais, ed. E. J. Dijksterhuis (Paris, 1950), pp. 113-30; Michael Hanby,
INTRODUCTION
9
the thesis stands in relation to a number of standard positions. At the most general
level, the book seeks to challenge the idea that early modern philosophy, including
natural philosophy, is concerned largely with issues of method and epistemology per se.
The primary focus, I shall suggest, was rather human nature—‘anthropology’ in its
broadest sense—and epistemological concerns, while undoubtedly present, were
secondary to this.20 This contrasts with a widespread view that regards the seventeenth
century as preoccupied with the foundations of knowledge and which characterizes the
transition from the medieval to the modern in terms of a shift from metaphysics to
epistemology. On this account, it is Descartes who inaugurates the modern age by
issuing a sceptical challenge and then solving it with his own radical foundationalism.
The agenda thus set, the British empiricists react against Descartes’ rationalism, leaving
it to Immanuel Kant (or possibly Hegel, depending on one’s philosophical predilections)
to offer the definitive solution to the problem of knowledge. This version of the history
of modern philosophy can be found, for example, in the influential writings of Kuno
Fischer (1824-1907).21 Fischer secured the place of Descartes’ Meditations as the
founding document of modernity, and enshrined the view that modern philosophy was
characterised by a split between rationalists and empiricists that was healed by the
critical philosophy of Immanuel Kant. Many introductions to modern philosophy still
follow this line, and undergraduates are typically introduced to the subject through the
Meditations. Integral to this received view is the assumption that the modern
epistemological project is essentially a secular one, representing the ascendency of
reason over faith, and setting up the conditions for the age of Enlightenment to follow.
Descartes’ reliance on God as the guarantor for his foundational project is thus often
dismissed as window dressing designed to placate potential ecclesiastical critics.
Certainly, it is true that Descartes avoids making reference to the revealed truths of
Christianity, including the doctrine of original sin, and he is quite forthcoming about his
reluctance to engage in ‘theological’ discussions. In this respect, however, he is rather
atypical and thus a poor exemplar for seventeenth-century philosophy generally. Very
few discussions of knowledge in the seventeenth century are devoid of references to the
Augustine and Modernity (London, 2003), esp. pp. 134-77.
20
Wilhelm Dilthey observed, at the close of the nineteenth century, that the advent of
modernity can be characterised as a turn from metaphysics to anthropology. ‘Die Funktion der
Anthropologie in der Kultur des 16. und 17. Jahrhunderts’, in Weltanschauung und Analyse des
Menschen Seit Renaissance und Reformation. William Diltheys Gesammelte Schriften II,
(Leibzig, 1914).
21
Kuno Fischer, Metaphysik oder Wisenschaftslehre (Stuttgart, 1852); Geschichte der neueren
Philosophie, 6 vols. (Mannheim, 1860). See Knud Haakonssen, ‘The History of Early Modern
Philosophy: The Construction of a Useful Past’, in C. Condren, S. Gaukroger and I. Hunter
(eds.), The Philosopher in Early Modern Europe: The Nature of a Contested Identity
INTRODUCTION
10
problem of sin in relation to knowledge. Indeed, surprising as it may seem, what
distinguishes seventeenth-century discussions of knowledge from scholasticism is not
their secular character but rather the fact that they tend to be more explicit in their
reliance on the resources of revealed theology than their medieval equivalents. Hence,
as we shall see, one of the most common seventeenth-century objections to scholastic
philosophy was that it was ‘pagan’ in character.
A variation on this thesis, and one closer to that set out in this book, is that the
Protestant Reformation precipitated an intellectual crisis by challenging traditional
sources of authority. Because this challenge extended to the very criteria for what
counted as true belief, the problem of knowledge became particularly acute. The
rediscovery of ancient scepticism, which coincided with the Reformation, greatly
exacerbated the problem, providing an impressive range of arguments to the effect that
nothing could be known with certainty.22 Michel de Montaigne, whose Apology for
Raymond Sebonde masterfully rehearses the sceptical arguments of Pyrrho of Elis,
played a major role in the revival of the ideas of these ancient schools and, along with
his disciples, made scepticism a fashionable philosophical option in the seventeenth
century. To a degree, sceptical arguments proved useful to the Counter Reformation
because they could be deployed against Protestant claims to doctrinal certainty.
Moreover, one of the standard sceptical prescriptions—in the face of our ignorance it is
best simply to follow the customs and traditions of one’s own country—counselled
against the adoption of novel religious views (such as those of the Protestants). Again
Descartes is the key figure. The sceptical intellectual atmosphere that flourished in the
early seventeenth century provided the point of departure for Descartes’ Meditations,
which begins with a radical scepticism, but concludes by triumphantly dispelling all
doubts with clear and distinct ideas. These provide the indubitable foundations for
knowledge. Richard Popkin, who has done most to highlight the role of scepticism in
early modern philosophy, thus considers Montaigne’s Apologie to be ‘the womb of
modern thought, in that it led to the attempt either to refute the new Pyrrhonism, or to
find a way of living with it.’23 Descartes provided just such a refutation, and in doing so
inaugurated the era of modern philosophy.
(Cambridge, 2006).
22
L. Floridi, ‘The Diffusion of Sextus Empiricus’s works in the Renaissance’, JHI 56 (1995),
63-85; and ‘The Rediscovery of Ancient Scepticism in Modern Times’, in The Skeptical
Tradition, ed. M. Burnyeat, (Berkeley, 1983), pp. 225-51; Charles B. Schmitt, Cicero
Scepticus: A Study of the Influence of the ‘Academica’ in the Renaissance (The Hague, 1972).
23
Richard H. Popkin, The History of Scepticism from Erasmus to Spinoza (Berkeley, 1979), p.
54. Cf. Ernst Cassirer, Das Erkenntnisproblem in der Philosophie und Wissenschaft der neueren
INTRODUCTION
11
This is a persuasive argument and one that has been justifiably influential. My own
view is that while there is some truth in the idea of a ‘sceptical crisis’, that crisis was
precipitated not only by the Reformers’ challenge to traditional authorities and the
revival of ancient scepticism, but also by a renewed emphasis on an Augustinian
anthropology that stressed the Fall and its epistemic consequences. This was
particularly so in England, although varieties of Augustinianism had strong support on
the Continent as well. It is true that both scepticism and Augustinian anthropology lead
to doubts about the reliability of human knowledge, but they offer quite different
prescriptions. For the sceptics, our ignorance is not the consequence of a cosmic
catastrophe precipitated by human disobedience; rather it is intrinsic to human nature
and is thus to be accepted with equanimity. Accordingly, the appropriate response lies
not in attempting to remedy the operations of the mind (which were naturally limited),
but in accepting the inevitable, suspending judgement, and cultivating an inner peace.24
For those who attributed our current state of ignorance to the Fall, the figure of Adam
had a dual significance. On the one hand, the Fall provided an explanation for human
misery and proneness to error; on the other, Adam’s prelapsarian perfections, including
his encyclopaedic knowledge, were regarded as a symbol of unfulfilled human potential.
It is this hopeful, forward-looking element that is absent from scepticism in either its
ancient or modern formulations. The sceptical prescription, moreover, is consistent
with the classical ideal of the philosopher as one who adopts a life of contemplation.
Those who took seriously the reality of the Fall, by way of contrast, were often
motivated to reverse, or partially reverse, its unfortunate effects, and this required a
Zeit, 2 vols. (Berlin, 1906-7) I, 162, 181. Popkin’s work appeared in three successively
expanded editions, the earlier work being The History of Scepticism from Erasmus to Descartes
(Van Gorcum, 1960), the later, The History of Scepticism from Savonarola to Bayle, (Oxford,
2003). Also see Popkin’s ‘Scepticism and Modernity’ in T. Sorell (ed.), The Rise of Modern
Philosophy: The Tension between the New and Traditional Philosophies from Machiavelli to
Leibniz (Oxford, 1993), pp. 15-32; ‘Theories of Knowledge’, Cambridge History of
Renaissance Philosophy [CHRP], ed. C. Schmitt & Q. Skinner (Cambridge, 1988), pp. 668-84.
For discussions or developments of this important thesis see The High Road to Pyrrhonism, ed.
Richard A. Watson and James E. Force (San Diego, 1980); Scepticism and Irreligion in the
Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries, ed. R. Popkin and Arjo Vanderjagt (Leiden, 1993); José
Maia Neto, ‘Academic Skepticism in Early Modern Philosophy, JHI 58 (1997), 199-220;
Brendan Dooley, The Social History of Skepticism: Experience and Doubt in Early Modern
Culture (Baltimore, 1999); Petr Lom, The Limits of Doubt: The Moral and Political
Implications of Skepticism (Albany, N.Y., 2001); The Return of Scepticism from Hobbes and
Descartes to Bayle, ed. Gianni Paganini (Dordrecht, 2003); Skepticism in Renaissance and PostRenaissance Thought: New Interpretations, ed. Richard Popkin and José Maia Neto (Amherst,
N.Y., 2003); Charles Larmore, ‘Scepticism’, in The Cambridge History of Seventeenth-Century
Philosophy, 2 vols., ed. Daniel Garber and Michael Ayers (Cambridge, 1998), II, 1145-1192;
Michael Ayers, ‘Popkin’s Revised Scepticism’, BJHS 12 (2004), 319-32.
24
The Pyrrhonic sceptics thus aimed at the suspension of judgment (epoche), which to lead to a
INTRODUCTION
12
commitment to the active life and an energetic engagement with both social and natural
realms. There will be further discussion of the Popkin thesis in chapter two.
Turning to more specific theories about religion and the origins of science, and
experimental science in particular, there is a long-established thesis that posits a
connection between theological voluntarism and the emergence of an empirical
approach to the investigation of nature. On most versions of this argument, the late
Middle Ages saw the development of a theological voluntarism that asserted the radical
freedom of God’s will. The Protestant reformers took up this view and served as the
agents for its propagation in the modern period. Because, on the voluntarist view, God
was not constrained by any prior rational considerations in his creation of the world, the
argument goes, human minds cannot know a priori, through the exercise of reason
alone, what specific order God will instantiate in the world. Instead recourse must be
had to empirical investigation. 25 While this position is not without merit and provides a
plausible account of the origins of the modern conception of laws of nature, it has a
number of deficiencies—not least the fact that Descartes was a radical voluntarist.26 If
my analysis is correct, it is not so much that God could have ordered nature in any way
he chose which is significant for the development of an experimental approach to
nature, but rather the fact that the Fall separated human beings from God and corrupted
state of unperturbability (ataraxia).
25
M. B. Foster, ‘The Christian Doctrine of Creation and the Rise of Modern Natural Science’,
Mind 43 (1934), 446-68; Francis Oakley, ‘Christian Theology and the Newtonian Science: The
Rise of the Concept of Laws of Nature’, Church History 30 (1961), 433-57; J. E. McGuire,
‘Boyle’s Conception of Nature’, JHI 33 (1972), 523-42; Eugene Klaaren, Religious Origins of
Modern Science (Grand Rapids, 1977); Peter Heimann, ‘Voluntarism and Immanence:
Conceptions of Nature in Eighteenth-century Thought’, JHI 39 (1978), 271-83; Betty Jo Teeter
Dobbs, The Janus Faces of Genius: The Role of Alchemy in Newton’s Thought (Cambridge,
1991); Margaret Osler, Divine Will and the Mechanical Philosophy: Gassendi and Descartes on
Contingency and Necessity in the Created World (Cambridge, 1994); Henry Guerlac,
‘Theological Voluntarism and Biological Analogies in Newton’s Physical Thought’, JHI 44
(1983), 219-29. See also Amos Funkenstein, Theology and Scientific Imagination (Princeton,
1986), ch. 3; John Henry, ‘Henry More versus Robert Boyle’, in Henry More (1614-87):
Tercentenary Essays, ed. Sarah Hutton (Dordrecht, 1990), pp. 55-76; James E. Force and
Richard H. Popkin, Essays on the Context, Nature, and Influence of Isaac Newton’s Theology
(Dordrecht, 1990); Antoni Malet, ‘Isaac Barrow on the Mathematization of Nature: Theological
Voluntarism and the Rise of Geometrical Optics’, JHI 58 (1997), 265-287; Margaret Osler,
‘Fortune, Fate, and Divination: Gassendi’s Voluntarist Theology and the Baptism of
Epicureanism’, in Atoms, Pneuma, and Tranquillity: Epicurean and Stoic Themes in European
Thought, ed. Margaret Osler (Cambridge, 1991), ‘The Intellectual Sources of Robert Boyle’s
Philosophy of Nature’, in Philosophy, Science, and Religion, 1640-1700, ed. Richard Ashcroft,
Richard Kroll, and Perez Zagorin (Cambridge, 1991); ‘Divine Will and Mathematical Truths:
Gassendi and Descartes on the Status of Eternal Truths’, in Descartes and his Contemporaries,
ed. R. Ariew and M. Grene (Chicago, 1995), pp. 145-158.
26
For a broader critique see Peter Harrison, ‘Voluntarism and Early Modern Science’, History
of Science 40 (2002), 63-89; ‘Was Newton a Voluntarist?’, in James E. Force and Sarah Hutton
(eds.), Newton and Newtonianism: New Studies, (Dordrecht, 2004), pp. 39-64.
INTRODUCTION
13
their minds. Nature itself had fallen, moreover, deviating from the original divine plan
and becoming less intelligible. The empirical and experimental approach was thus not
necessitated because of the in-principle unpredictability of the divine will. Rather the
inconveniences and limitations of experimental natural philosophy are the inevitable
outcome of a realization of the fallen condition of humanity. If the manner of God’s
direction of the operations of nature is inscrutable to human minds, this is on account of
the limitations of the latter, rather than the irrationality of the former.
Another important line argument points to the significance of puritan millenarianism,
particularly in the context of seventeenth century English natural philosophy. It is the
misfortune of every historian who chooses to address the question of theological
influences on the development of experimental science in England to stand in the great
shadow cast by Charles Webster’s magisterial and encyclopaedic Great Instauration
(1975, 2002).27 Inasmuch as a significant proportion of the present book deals with
Adamic science and the prospects for its recovery, it bears an important relation to this
earlier work. Webster has argued that one of the most significant periods in the
development of English science took place during the period between 1640 and 1660,
when Puritan millenarianism provided the inspiration for a range of revolutionary
scientific projects. This millenarianism was inspired in part by the prospect of restoring
to humanity the perfections once enjoyed by Adam in Eden, including his vast scientific
knowledge, thus establishing a state of affairs that was thought be a necessary
precondition for the onset of the millennium. Following the restoration of the
monarchy in 1660, the radical aspects of this vision were viewed with disfavour, but
significant elements of it were taken up by the Royal Society and the Royal College of
Physicians. My thesis is not a challenge to Webster’s, but rather presupposes many of
the basic contentions set out there and attempts to place them within a broader context,
both temporally and geographically. Rather than emphasizing the discontinuities
between revolutionary and Restoration science, and indeed between puritan science and
the science associated with other confessional groupings, it seeks to show how their
differences are to be understood in terms of varying assessments of the Fall, and of the
extent to which prelapsarian conditions might be re-established in the present world.
Moreover, while Webster’s treatment of the theme of the Fall is primarily in the context
of puritan millenarianism, the emphasis of this work is the implications of the Fall for
27
Charles Webster, The Great Instauration: Science, Medicine, and Reform, 1626-1660
(London, 1975); 2nd edn (Bern, 2002).
INTRODUCTION
14
theological anthropology.28 There will be further discussion of these issues in chapter
four.
Because a major focus of this book is the development of experimentalism in the
English context, some of the themes of another classic work in the history of early
modern science are also relevant. In Leviathan and the Air Pump (1985), Steven Shapin
and Simon Schaffer pose fundamental questions about why one does experiments in
order to arrive at scientific truth, and why experimentation has come to be regarded as
superior to alternative ways of establishing knowledge.29 They rightly argue that such
questions are often overlooked by modern historians because the presuppositions of
contemporary cultural practices—such as science—are rarely regarded as problematic.
This is less true now than when Shapin and Schaffer first wrote, but it remains the case
that historians are embedded within a culture in which the virtues of experimentation
seem self-evident. From the present perspective, then, it can be difficult to understand
the extent to which in the seventeenth century the new experimental approach of such
figures as Francis Bacon and Robert Boyle was controversial and counter-intuitive. It is
also easy to overlook the strength of the arguments raised against it. Key objections to
‘the experimental philosophy’ were that it did not count as genuine knowledge because
it failed to establish the causes of phenomena, and that it fell short of the certainty that
characterised genuine science, the goal of which was the kind of demonstration found in
logic or geometry. I shall suggest that the new ‘probabilistic and fallibilistic conception
of man’s natural knowledge’, that according to Shapin and Schaffer distinguished the
approach of the experimentalists, was inspired by a new theological emphasis on the
inherent weakness of fallen human minds.30 By the same token, many opponents of the
experimental programme who retained elements of a more traditional Aristotelian
approach or who emphasised the possibility of mathematical certainties subscribed to a
more optimistic view of human capabilities. The role of theological anthropology in
these various positions becomes more apparent the more we are able to enter into the
cultural milieu of the seventeenth century and recapture something of the strangeness of
the prescriptions of the experimental approach.
28
For Webster’s emphasis, see Great Instauration (1975), p. xvi.
Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the
Experimental Life (Princeton, 1985), p. 1
30
Ibid., p. 23. For the new emphasis on probability, see Barbara Shapiro, Probability and
Certainty in Seventeenth Century England (Princeton, 1983), ch. 2; Ian Hacking, The
Emergence of Probability (Cambridge, 1975), chs. 3-5.
29
INTRODUCTION
15
Another relevant contention of Shapin and Schaffer is that there was a close relation
between the problem of knowledge and the problem of social order in the seventeenth
century. One of the reasons for this, I shall suggest, is that ignorance and unsociability
were numbered together among the more serious consequences of the Fall. As we shall
see, those arguing for particular political arrangements typically supported their views
by invoking, in various ways, the original sovereignty exercised by Adam. The
coercive powers of the state, moreover, were justified as necessary evils designed to
curb the aggressive and selfish impulses of sinful subjects. By analogy, the
methodological strictures of particular programmes of natural philosophy—
experimental method being perhaps the best example—were understood as applying
necessary external constraints to fallen minds which, left to their own devices, would
simply fail to accumulate any useful knowledge of the natural world.
Finally, the biblical elements of the present work also represent an extension of my own
previous book on the bible and the rise of science.31 In essence, that work suggested
that when in the sixteenth century the book of scripture began to be read in a literal,
historical sense, it had a major impact on the way in which the book of nature was
interpreted. Medieval allegorical readings of scripture had assumed a natural world in
which objects symbolised spiritual truths. The demise of the allegory and its
replacement by a literal and historical approach called for a reconfiguring of the natural
order, the intelligibility of which was no longer seen to reside in symbolic meanings.
While the major focus of that previous work was a consideration of the consequences of
the turn to the literal sense of the scripture, the present book looks at one consequence
of that literal turn—the way in which the account of Adam’s Fall, now read almost
exclusively as an historical narrative rather than an allegory—influenced both
theological anthropology and early modern science.
It remains to say something about the structure of the book. The first chapter offers a
description of the biblical, patristic and medieval interpretations of the story of Adam’s
fall, along with an account of the development of the doctrine of original sin. It is not
intended as a history of the ‘unit idea’ of the Fall, but provides background without
which it would be difficult to make sense of the arguments advanced by various early
modern figures.32 The second chapter deals with the anthropology of the Protestant
31
Peter Harrison, The Bible, Protestantism and the Rise of Natural Science (Cambridge, 1998).
This is not the appropriate place for a discussion of the relative merits of various styles of
intellectual history. However it may be a relevant consideration that seventeenth-century
thinkers, lacking the sophistication of Cambridge School intellectual historians, assumed that
32
INTRODUCTION
16
reformers, their rejection of scholastic Aristotelianism, and their revisiting of the
Augustinian position on original sin. Consideration is also given to the re-emergence of
scepticism and the Catholic revival of Augustinianism. In the chapter that follows,
brief examples are provided of some of the ways in which Reformation anthropology
influenced the development of natural philosophy in the sixteenth century—Philipp
Melanchthon and his revision of the doctrine of ‘natural light’, subsequently adopted by
Johannes Kepler; the attempts of Lambert Daneau and others to ground natural
philosophy in the authority of scripture; ‘enthusiastic’ proposals to rely on personal
inspiration for knowledge of nature. This chapter does not set out a comprehensive
catalogue of those individuals who subscribed to these various positions, but rather
provides examples of the possible range of views. The last two chapters bear the main
burden of establishing the importance of the Fall in the genealogy of experimental
science in the English context. The chief subject of chapter four is ‘anthropological
turn’ in seventeenth century England, and the manner in which Francis Bacon’s
proposed instauration of natural philosophy was conceived of as a recovery of
knowledge lost as a consequence of the Fall. The final chapter continues this story into
the middle and later decades of the seventeenth century, giving consideration to how the
methodological prescriptions of the English experimentalists, and Fellows of the Royal
Society in particular, were shaped by the narrative of the Fall. Here the development of
the experimental philosophy is closely linked with a particular understanding of original
sin. The last two sections of the chapter deal with Boyle, Locke and Newton, and show
how the narrative of the Fall was gradually written out of justifications of scientific
practice, leaving the impression that experiment was self-evidently the proper way to
pursue scientific investigation. A conclusion and references follow.
theological doctrines did have a chronological history. For a recent discussion of some of these
historiographical issues, and for a specific justification of a chronological treatment of the idea
of ‘the Fall’, see John Patrick Diggins, ‘Arthur O. Lovejoy and the Challenge of Intellectual
History’, JHI 67 (2006), 181-209. In any case, readers can decide for themselves whether this
chronological approach helpfully contributes to an understanding of later developments and
forms part of a coherent historical account.
CHAPTER 5. THE INSTAURATION OF LEARNING
And as at first, mankind fell by tasting of the forbidden Tree of Knowledge, so
we, their Posterity, may be in part restor’d by the same way, not only by
beholding and contemplating, but by tasting too those fruits of Natural
knowledge, there were never yet forbidden.’
Robert Hooke, Micrographia (London, 1665), Preface
Whence, our First Enquiry ought to be, how Man’s Nature come to be so
Disabled from performing its Primary Operation, or from Reasoning rightly….
Divines will tell us that this mischief happens thro’ Original Sin.
John Sergeant, The Method to Science (London, 1696), Sig. av-a2r.
‘… we create tragedy after tragedy for ourselves by a lazy unexamined doctrine
of man which is current amongst us and which the study of history does not
support…. It is essential not to have faith in human nature.’
Herbert Butterfield, Christianity and History, pp. 46f. 1
The striking frontispiece of the 1620 edition of Bacon’s Great Instauration bears a text
from the apocalyptic book of Daniel that reads: ‘Multi pertransibunt et augebitur
scientia’—Many shall go to and fro, and knowledge shall be increased.2 As Charles
Webster has ably demonstrated, the turbulent decades between Bacon’s death in 1626
and the restoration of the monarchy in 1660 witnessed a remarkable marriage of Puritan
millenarianism and a Baconian promotion of knowledge and learning. While it is true
that the scientific writings of this period were remarkably eclectic and drew upon a
variety of ancient and modern natural philosophies, it was the millenarian aspects of the
Baconian programme that provided inspiration for a whole variety of scientific and
technological projects. Whatever Bacon’s own religious predilections, his philosophy
could have been specifically tailored for puritan purposes.3 Having said this, the Puritan
eschatology of the period was characterised by a quite specific chiliastic vision. It was
not a matter of complacently awaiting the Day of judgment, or of passively reading the
‘signs’ that signalled the imminence of the millennium. Godly individuals were to be
active participants in history, directing their efforts towards the establishment of those
conditions that would usher in the final age of the world. For the puritans, and indeed
1
Herbert Butterfield, Christianity and History (London, 1949), pp. 46f.
Dan. 12:4 The Vulgate actually reads ‘plurimi pertransibunt et multiplex erit scientia’, which
Bacon accurately cites in Advancement, Works III, 340. Whether the change of wording was
deliberate is not clear. See Farrington’s comment, Philosophy of Francis Bacon, p. 132.
3
Webster, Great Instauration, pp. 486, 514f.
2
CHAPTER 5. THE INSTAURATION OF LEARNING
19
many Protestants, the reformation of religion in the sixteenth century was the historical
event that had triggered the apocalyptic countdown. Since then, revolutions in learning
and advances in such diverse spheres as navigation and printing confirmed them in their
belief that the end time was quickly approaching. The voyages of discovery not only
expanded existing knowledge of the world, but also raised the prospect of the gospel
being preached to the whole world for the first time—a signal occurrence that had
traditionally had been considered a prerequisite for the culmination of human history.
On the negative side of the ledger, the 1620s was not a happy decade for Europe, and
for Protestants in particular. The combined effects of economic depression and war
brought untold misery to millions, and Catholic forces had begun to make significant
gains in the Protestant heartlands of the Palatinate, Bohemia, and Poland. For a time the
very existence of Continental Protestantism seemed under threat, and England seemed
either unwilling or unable to lend military support to its co-religionists. The spirit of
Antichrist seemed to loom larger than at any previous time in history. These events
fuelled an upswing of apocalyptic sentiment in Protestant Europe, and refugees fleeing
persecution and religious violence brought it with them to the shores of England, where
it melded with domestic millenarianism. On those shores, the publication in 1627 of
Joseph Mede’s enormously influential Clavis Apocalyptica showed how biblical
prophecy could be directly applied to the interpretation of contemporary historical
events, and many were to appropriate its interpretive principles to demonstrate the
imminence of the end times.4 Along with the book of Revelation, which provided the
main subject matter for Mede’s Clavis, the apocalyptic prophecies of Daniel came to
assume great importance for puritan millenarians in the revolutionary period of
seventeenth-century England. The verse cited by Bacon assumed particular importance
and often appeared in the sermons of puritan preachers, reinforcing the message that the
last days would be heralded by an unprecedented increase in knowledge.5 The
immediate context of the Daniel passage refers to the end times when ‘those who are
wise will shine like the brightness of the heavens, and those who lead many to
righteousness, like the stars for ever and ever’ (12.3). Passages such as these served to
inspire puritan activists in their efforts to reform society, to rebuild the institutions of
learning, to promote arts and sciences, and to usher in a new era of peace and prosperity.
4
MacCulloch, Reformation, pp. 469-84; Hugh Trevor-Roper, ‘Three Foreigners: The
Philosophers of the Puritan Revolution’, in The Crisis of the Seventeenth Century (Indianapolis,
2001), pp. 219-71. For the rise of apocalypticism, prophecy and astrology during this period see
Patrick Curry, Prophecy and Power: Astrology in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 1989);
Christopher Hill, Antichrist in Seventeenth Century England (London, 1971); Kinch Hoekstra,
‘Disarming the Prophets: Thomas Hobbes and Predictive Power’, Rivista di storia della filosofia
1 (2004), 97-153.
CHAPTER 5. THE INSTAURATION OF LEARNING
20
I. ‘KNOWLEDGE SHALL BE INCREASED ’
One of the many immigrants to settle in England during these turbulent times was
Samuel Hartlib (c. 1600-1662) who, along with fellow émigré Amos Comenius, was to
play a vital role in the development of an eschatologically oriented reformation of
learning. A native of the Baltic port of Elbing, Hartlib had studied at Emmanuel
College, Cambridge in the 1620s. He settled in London in 1628, and soon established
himself at the hub of one of the most important networks of correspondence in the
seventeenth century. Some sense of his commitment to the task of rebuilding the world
in its final days can be gauged from the short utopian work Macaria which he published
(but did not author) in 1641. The book describes an Edenic world subdued by
agriculture and colonization so that the whole land is once again ‘like to a fruitfull
Garden’, thus linking an Edenic past to the coming Kingdom.6 Macaria provides us
with a clear sense of the specifically puritan proactive vision of the future: ‘a
Reformation shall come before the day of judgment … therefore with alacrity let us
pursue our good intentions and bee good instruments in this worke of Reformation.’7
We encounter the same combination of the indicative and the imperative in Comenius
who shared many of Harlib’s ideals, and well as his Continental Calvinist background.
Comenius announced that there will ‘a multiplication of knowledge and light at the very
evening of the world Dan. 12.4 Zach. 14.7.’ ‘Therefore’, he concluded, ‘let us
endeavour that this be promoted.’8
Puritan promoters of learning thus appropriated Bacon’s incipient apocalypticism. They
also took to heart his conception of science as a corporate and cumulative activity as the
means to increase knowledge, and thus to hasten the millennium. Communal
endeavour, moreover, was thought to secure knowledge against the errors of corrupt
individual minds. ‘It’s in vaine to hope that humane things, prolapsed and faln to decay
by the common errours of all can be restored and made entire’, Comenius observed,
5
Webster, Great Instauration, pp. 9-12.
[Gabriel Plattes], Macaria (London, 1641), p. 4. Hartlib himself has usually been credited
with authorship, of Marcaria but it is probably the work of his colleague Gabriel Plattes. See
Charles Webster, ‘The Authorship and Significance of Macaria’, Past and Present 56 (1972),
34-48. Similar Edenic images may also be found in Walter Blith, The English Improver
Improved (London, 1652), sig. d3v; Ralph Austen, A Treatise of Fruit Trees (London, 1657),
sig. ¶1r; Pettus, History of Adam and Eve, p. 43. See also Scott Mandelbrote, ‘Représentations
bibliques et édéniques du jardin à l'âge classique’, XVIIe siècle 52 (2000), 645-54.
7
Plattes, Macaria, p. 13.
6
CHAPTER 5. THE INSTAURATION OF LEARNING
21
‘without the common help and joynt assistance of all.’9 In keeping with this principle,
Hartlib took it upon himself to coordinate the disparate endeavours of those striving to
improve knowledge and human welfare. Soon after his arrival in London he began to
cultivate a wide circle of correspondents, drawing heavily upon his contacts in
Continental communities of Protestant refugees. One of his key contacts was John Dury
(1596-1680), a Calvinist minister originally from Edinburgh, but at that time in
Hartlib’s Polish hometown Elbing. Dury shared Hartlib’s heady utopian vision of a
universal republic of learning that shared a common Protestant religion. From his
London residence, and with the assistance of a secretary and a small group of copyists,
Hartlib received manuscripts, reports of experiments and inventions, requests for
information, and all manner of proposals for the improvement of agriculture, medicine,
commerce and chemistry. These would be copied, summarised if need be, and sent out
again to his numerous correspondents. In the late 1640s, in the wake of the victory of
the Parliamentary party, Hartlib sought to make his role a more formal one, designated
‘the Office of Address’ with official government support.10 While his proposal was
viewed favourably, it was never formally implemented. Undaunted, Hartlib continued
in the role through the 1650s and garnered himself a reputation as one of Europe’s key
co-ordinators of scientific information. He was variously dubbed the ‘hub and axeltree
of knowledge’, ‘the great intelligencer of Europe’, the ‘conduit pipe’ through which the
learning of Europe was channelled.11
Hartlib and Comenius had also sought to reform institutions of learning and to establish
new foundations that would embody principles and practises of Solomon’s House.
During Comenius’s visit in 1641, the two settled upon Chelsea College—an institution
founded in 1610 by James I, but now standing derelict—as the best venue for the
realisation of their ambitious strategy. Comenius was to become the Dean of the college,
which would reflect the Baconian ideal of a recapture of Edenic wisdom (a goal that
was restated in Comenius’s own Via lucis (‘The Way of Light’, 1642). The ultimate
plan was for Protestant England to become a beacon of learning whose light would
illuminate the whole of a benighted Europe. Unfortunately, England was on the brink
of its own military crisis, and the onset of civil war in 1642 meant that the Parliament
8
Comenius, A Patterne of Universall Knowledge (London, 1651), tr. Jeremy Collier, p. 65; Cf.
Reformation of Schooles, pp. 4, 26.
9
Comenius, Universal Knowledge, p. 20.
10
Details of the scheme are provided in Considerations Tending to the Happy Accomplishment
of Englands Reformation in Church and State (London, 1647).
11
Mark Greengrass, Leslie Taylor and Timothy Raylor (eds.), Samuel Hartlib and the
Universal Reformation: Studies in Intellectual Communication (Cambridge, 1994), Introduction,
CHAPTER 5. THE INSTAURATION OF LEARNING
22
had turned its attention to the more pressing matter of the war in Ireland. But there was
still considerable support for educational reform amongst the puritans. John Milton
offered a somewhat belated contribution to Hartlib’s efforts with his tract Of Education
(1644). While these two may have differed on issues relating to the content of the
curriculum, they shared the view that improvement of the institutions of learning was
long overdue. ‘To write now of the reforming of education’, Milton observed, is ‘one of
the greatest and noblest designs that can by thought on, and for the want whereof this
nation perishes.’ Milton, as we have already noted, regarded education as a way of
‘repairing the ruins of our first parents’.12 His brief proposal included recommendations
relating not only to the content of the curriculum, but to the kinds of practical matters
that Hartlib and Comenius had also given thought to: housing, maximum enrolment, age
range of pupils, along with ruminations on diet and exercise. Milton’s was one of fifty
works written between 1640 and 1660 devoted to the topic of educational reform. The
vast majority of these were associated with the Hartlib group.13
If hopes for a new bricks and mortar institution that would embody the ideals of
Solomons’s house were dashed, the 1640s nonetheless witnessed the emergence of a
number of important informal groups devoted to the promotion of knowledge, and more
specifically to experimental philosophy. One of these was the ‘Invisible College’, about
which very little is known, apart from the fact that Robert Boyle was a participant and
that it convened in the two years 1646-7. Another group had begun to coalesce around
the mathematician John Wallis (1616-1703) at about the same time. This latter group
was devoted to the ‘new philosophy’ of Galileo and Bacon, and included in its
membership John Wilkins, Francis Glisson, George Ent, Seth Ward, and Thomas
Willis.14 Both were important precursors of the Royal Society. In spite of widespread
criticism of the hidebound conservatism of the universities, the new philosophy also
made inroads at these venues. And while the disruption caused by the onset of civil
war may have distracted the Parliament from formal plans to establish a new foundation
of godly learning, that body nonetheless resolved to reform the existing universities,
seeking specifically to bring an end to the domination of the curriculum by
scholasticism. Whatever the intention of the parliamentary party, it cannot be doubted
that the middle decades of the century witnessed the introduction of significant aspects
p. 16; Trevor-Roper, ‘Three Foreigners’.
12
Milton, Of Education, in Works, pp. 225, 226.
13
Webster, Samuel Hartlib and the Advancement of Learning (Cambridge, 1971), pp. 208-11.
14
C. J. Scriba, ‘The Autobiography of John Wallis’, Notes and Records of the Royal Society, 25
(1970), 17–46
CHAPTER 5. THE INSTAURATION OF LEARNING
23
of the new learning of Galileo, Descartes, and Harvey at the ancient universities. At
Cambridge, Henry More introduced students to Descartes’ Principles of Philosophy,
while Isaac Barrow and John Ray promoted experimental philosophy and
mathematics.15 Wallis’s ‘experimental philosophy club’ also began meeting in Oxford
in about 1648-9, hosted successively by William Petty, John Wilkins and, following
Wilkins’ move to Cambridge, Robert Boyle.
II. REVERSING BABEL
While the millenarian motivations of these groups suggest a future-oriented ethos, the
history of Adam remained a central preoccupation. John Webster (1611-82), who was
introduced in the third chapter, was typical in this regard. A schoolmaster and an active
participant in discussions about the restructuring of social and educational institutions
during the Commonwealth, Webster had diverse philosophical inspirations. Apart from
a deep commitment to Baconian ideals, he approved of the theosophy of Boehme and
Fludd, subscribed to the atomism of Digby, and supported elements of van Helmont’s
iatrochemistry (the use of chemical rather than herbal preparations in medicine). In all
of this he was sharply critical of Aristotelian learning which in his view suffered from a
misplaced trust in the powers of human reason. The ‘much magnified natural reason’ of
the peripatetic schools, he claimed, was in reality ‘the fruit and effect of the forbidden
tree, … a spurious and adventitious faculty which man wanted in his innocency, and
was instilled in him by Satan in the fall.’ Confidence in human reason alone, he
insisted, gave rise to knowledge that was ‘fleshly, earthly, deadly and destructive.’16
Aristotle’s philosophy, in brief, was the corrupted knowledge of the fallen
creature. It did not follow that all forms of natural philosophy were to be shunned
however, for if prosecuted properly the study of nature had two vital uses: first, it
enabled the philosopher to discern ‘characters’ or ‘hieroglyphics’ of the divine power in
the things of nature; second, knowledge of the operations of causes and effects would
enable the investigator ‘to make use of them for the general good and benefit of
mankind, especially for the conservation and restauration of the health of man, and of
those creatures that are usefull for him.’17 Adamic science provided the model of this
godly natural philosophy.
15
16
17
Webster, Great Instauration, pp. 134f., 150-3.
Webster, The Saints Guide, pp. 6, 4.
Webster, Academiarum Examen, p. 19.
CHAPTER 5. THE INSTAURATION OF LEARNING
24
In speaking of the ‘characters’ of the natural world, Webster was not merely alluding to
the ubiquitous trope of the ‘book of nature’, for in his conception, nature was literally
written in a language that Adam had once been able to read. There was a ‘Paradisical
language’ that Adam had used in Eden, and which he had used to bestow names upon
the beasts. Unlike the labels of conventional language, these names were not imposed
arbitrarily on things. Rather, they uniquely identified them and perfectly expressed their
true natures. In Eden, Webster informs us, ‘the imposition of names was adequately
agreeing with their natures; otherwise it could not be univocally and truly be said to be
their names, whereby he distinguished them.’18 It followed that Adam knew ‘the
internal natures, virtues, effects, operations, and qualities of the creatures’, indeed
Adam’s encyclopaedic knowledge was nothing other than facility in the very language
of nature. After the entry of sin into the world, this language of things was ‘defaced and
forgotten’.19 However, Webster was encouraged by the possibility that this primitive
language might be recovered, and with it Adamic learning. Indeed it was the common
belief that the knowledge of the primitive tongue, if reacquired, would confer
knowledge of the natures of things. Bacon himself had asserted that ‘the imposition of
names’ was one of the summary parts of knowledge and, moreover, that ‘whensoever he
shall be able to call the creatures by their true names he shall again command them.’20
Some, like Webster, associated the Adamic language with the Renaissance doctrine of
signatures, according to which natural objects (and plants particularly) bore some sign
that indicated their use. The shape of the kidney bean, to take a simple example,
indicates that it is to be prescribed for ailments of that organ.21 God, it was thought, had
impressed these signatures on objects to show their interior properties and their uses.
The science of signatures was linked to the discipline of physiognomy, which also
conveyed the inner workings of things by external signs. Webster described
physiognomy as ‘that laudable, excellent, and profitable science … from which and by
certain external signs, signatures and lineaments, doth explicate the internal nature and
18
Ibid., pp. 27, 29.
Ibid., pp. 30, 27.
20
Bacon, Advancement, I.vi.6 (p. 38); Of the Interpretation of Nature, Works III, 222. See also
Walker, History of the Creation, pp. 193, 229; Boehme, The Second Booke, Sig A3r; John
Pettus, History of Adam and Eve, p. 60; Francis Bamfield, Miqra qadosh, The Holy Scripture
(London, 1684), Title page. Also see discussions in Håkan Håkansson, Seeing the Word: John
Dee and Renaissance Occultism (Lund, 2001), pp. 100-108; Bono, Word of God, ch. 8.
21
For representative adherents see Boehme, Signatura Rerum (London, 1651); Oswald Croll,
Of Signatures (London, 1669); Paracelsus, Die 9 Bücher der Natura Rerum, in Sämliche Werke,
ed. Sudhoff, xi, 393. Della Porta, Natural Magick (London, 1658), p. 17 and passim; Richard
Saunders, Saunders Physiognomie and Chiromancie, Metoposcopie, 2nd edn. (London, 1671);
Coles, Adam in Eden, To the Reader.
19
CHAPTER 5. THE INSTAURATION OF LEARNING
25
quality of natural bodies.’22 For Webster, knowledge of these signs had provided the
basis of the natural science of Adam although, of course, this had been lost—either
because of the corruption of human nature, or because the Fall had erased these once
conspicuous ciphers from the surfaces of natural objects.23 In its present state, then, the
science of signatures was fragmented and imperfect, and likely to remain so unless
further efforts were devoted to extending and improving it.24
There was also considerable speculation about the possibility that the original Adamic
tongue had survived the catastrophes of the Fall and Babel, and was still spoken (or
written) somewhere on the globe. Hebrew was the traditional candidate for this role,
partly because of some remarks in Augustine’s City of God suggesting that the language
of the ancient Israelites had been spared the confusion of tongues.25 The priority of
Hebrew was the fundamental assumption of Cabbalism, a mystical Jewish tradition that
sought hidden meanings of the Hebrew characters of Scripture. Christianised versions
of Cabbalism flourished during the Renaissance, finding powerful exponents amongst
humanist scholars.26 In his Occult Philosophy Agrippa von Nettesheim suggested that
Adam’s original Hebrew names ‘contain in them wonderful powers of the things
signified.’ Because God had used speech to create the world—‘And God said …’
(Gen. 1)—letters and words could be said to form the very structure of the cosmos. As
Agrippa expressed it: ‘there are therefore two and twenty Letters, which are the
foundation of the world, and of creatures that are, and are named in it, and every saying,
and every creature are of them, and by their revolutions receive their Name, being, and
Virtue.’27 Johannes Reuchlin (1455-1522), Great-Uncle to Philipp Melanchthon and
22
Webster, Academiarum Examen, p. 76.
Ibid., pp. 27, 29. Cf. Coles, Adam in Eden, To the Reader; Saunders, Saunders
Physiognomie, Preface.
24
See also the suggestions of More, An Antidote, pp. 56f., and Coles, Adam in Eden, Preface.
25
Augustine, City of God, XVI.11. Supporters of this view included Browne, Pseudodoxia
Epidemica V.xxiii; VI.i (I, 434f., 442); Gulielmus Postellus, De originibus deu Hebraicae
linguae (Parisiis, 1538), Fols. Aiiir-Aivr; Agrippa von Nettesheim, Three Books of Occult
Philosophy, pp. 162f.; J.H. Heidegger, De historia sacra patriarchum, 2 tom. (Amstelodami,
1667-71), I, 462f.; Richard Simon, A Critical History of the Old Testament (London, 1682),
I.xiv (pp. 97-101); John Selden, De Synedriis ... veterum Ebraeorum, Prolegomenon, cap. iii;
Lightfoot, The Works of the Learned & Reverend John Lightfoot D. D. 2 vols., (London, 1684),
I, 1012; Thomas Brett, A Chronological Essay on the Sacred History (London, 1629), pp. 5693; Simon Patrick, A Commentary, pp. 218f. Also see discussion in H. Pinard de la Boullaye,
L’Etude Compareé des Religions (Paris, 1922) pp. 158-63. Most of the language projectors of
the mid-seventeenth century also believed in the priorty of Hebrew. See e.g., George Dalgarno,
‘On Double and Triple Consonants’ in Cram and Maat (eds.), George Dalgarno, p. 335;
Wilkins, Essay, p. 5.
26
Alison Coudert, The Impact of the Kabbalah in the Seventeenth Century (Leiden, 1999);
Håkansson, Seeing the Word, pp. 170-84.
27
Agrippa, Occult Philosophy, p. 162. Pythagorean and Platonic glosses on this position were
23
CHAPTER 5. THE INSTAURATION OF LEARNING
26
pioneer of the teaching of Hebrew in the German universities, attributed Solomon’s
great wisdom to his ability to discern hidden scientific knowledge ‘in the minutiae of
grammar [and] in the letters’ of the Hebrew bible.28 Recovery of the power of these
words was often understood as the means by which Adamic knowledge dominion were
to be re-established. Reuchlin believed the whole purpose of Cabbalistic interpretation
was to effect a ‘universal restoration, after the primordial Fall of the human race’. In an
interesting variation on the topos of the regaining of Adamic knowledge, Reuchlin held
the view that Cabbala was delivered to Adam after his expulsion from Eden. In a
version of events that shares elements of the Sepher Raziel legend, Reuchlin suggested
that God, in his compassion, had sent an angel to teach Adam how the divine words
might be interpreted so as to repair the ruins of Edenic wisdom.29
Despite its obvious antiquity and its centrality in cabbalistic practices, as a candidate for
the original, natural language, Hebrew suffered from the disadvantage that its written
form was alphabetical, and it was thus incapable of representing things pictorially. For
some, this ruled it out of contention. It was also contended that contemporary Hebrew
would in any case have been a much-corrupted form of the original tongue, if for no
other reason than that the modern Jews seemed to have no better knowledge of nature
than anyone else. As we have seen, Bacon pointed to the fact that Chinese was written
‘in characters real, which express neither letter nor words in gross.’ Thomas Browne
was similarly intrigued by the fact that the ‘Chinoys’ spoke an ancient language and
used a ‘common character’. Further evidence for the priority of Chinese lay in the fact
that their chronologies were said to trace their ancestry back to a founding father known
as ‘Poncuus’, a figure often identified with the biblical Noah.30 This combination of
facts raised the enticing possibility that Noah and his family had preserved the original
tongue, that the Ark had landed in China, and that in the form of writing still extant
were remnants of the very first forms of writing and speech. Browne was himself
doubtful about this chain of events—he had a greater interest in Egyptian
hieroglyphics—but the priority of Chinese was strongly championed later in the century
to regard the divine creative act as a numering of things rather than a naming and hence
numbers might be regarded as the basic units of the language of nature. See S. Heniger, Jr.,
Touches of Sweet Harmony: Pythagorean Cosmology and Renaissance Poetics (San Marino,
1974).
28
Johannes Reuchlin, On the Art of the Kabbalah, p. 249, qu. in Håkansson, Seeing the Word,
p. 176.
29
Reuchlin, Art of Kabbalah, pp. 62-5, 68f., 158f.; Håkansson, Seeing the Word, pp. 179f.;
Wilhelm Schmidt-Biggemann, ‘Christian Kabbala’, in Alison Coudert (ed.), The Language of
Adam / Die Sprache Adams (Wiesbaden, 1999), pp. 81-121.
CHAPTER 5. THE INSTAURATION OF LEARNING
27
by John Webb, in An Historical Essay, Endeavoring a Probability that the Language of
the Empire of China is the Primitive Language (1669).31 While this thesis attracted
some enthusiastic adherents, it was eventually acknowledged that Chinese idiograms
suffered from the major shortcoming that they were difficult to draw and even more
difficult to learn—not characteristics of a supposedly natural and transparent means of
representation.32 The other major contender—Egyptian hieroglyphics, which had
attracted the attention of Bacon, Browne, and the Jesuit polymath Athanasius Kircher—
had the advantage of obvious antiquity but were in other respects inferior to Chinese
characters, not least because they were impervious to all efforts to translate them. They
remained so until 1822 when, after much concerted effort, Jean-François Champollion
finally deciphered them after the discovery of the Rosetta Stone.33
Both of these options for the recovery of the Adamic language, in the middle decades of
the seventeenth century at least, gave a central place to direct divine inspiration.
Webster followed Boehme in his conviction that the key to the secret language of nature
would be given through the inspiration of the Spirit. Just as the key to the meaning of
scripture was given only by the Spirit of God, so the knowledge of true signatures of
nature relied on divine inspiration.34 According to Robert Fludd, Moses and Solomon
came into their knowledge only by the assistance of the spirit. The patriarch had
‘conversed with God and obtained the key to both types of understanding (natural and
supernatural) by divine assistance and illumination of the most Holy Spirit.’35 The new
revelation of the true language of nature was considered to be a reversal of the curse of
Babel, calling to mind the words of the Prophet Joel that were repeated by the Apostle
Peter on the occasion of the linguistic miracle of Pentecost: ‘I will pour out my Spirit in
30
Thomas Browne, ‘Of Languages, and Particularly of the Saxon Tongue’, Works, ed. Geoffrey
Keynes (London, 1928) III, 71.
31
(London, 1669). Webb relied on Jesuit accounts of Chinese chronology and argued that it
was also likely that the Chinese had preserved something of the primitive religion. See
Harrison, ‘Religion’ and the Religions, pp. 151-7.
32
John Wilkins, Mercury, or, the Secret and Swift Messenger, in Mathematical and
Philosophical Works, 2 vols. (London, 1802), pp. 106f.; Essay, pp. 10, 451; Cave Beck, The
Universal Character (London, 1657) Preface; Hale, Primitive Origination, p. 163; Robert
Hooke, ‘Some Observations, and Conjectures concerning Chinese Characters’, Philosophical
Transactions of the Royal Society, XVI (1696), 63-78. (65, 73); Wotton, Reflections upon
Ancient and Modern Learning (London, 1694), p. 154.
33
Bacon, Advancement of Learning, I.vi.9 (p. 39); cf. II.xvi.2 (p. 131); Browne, ‘Of
Languages’. Kircher thought that the Chinese language had been derived from the Egyptian. Of
the Various Voyages and Travels undertaken into China, in Peter de Goyer and Jacob de
Keyzer, An Embassy from the east India Company of the United Provinces to the grand Tartar
Cham Emperour of China (London, 1669), pp. 75f. Cf. Kircher, Oedipus Aegypitiacus, pt. II.
34
Webster, Academiarum Examen, pp. 7-9.
35
Fludd, Apologia compendiaria in Huffman (ed.), Robert Fludd, pp. 46, 52. Cf. Mosaicall
Philosophy, pp. 3, 10.
CHAPTER 5. THE INSTAURATION OF LEARNING
28
those days, and they will prophesy, I will show wonders in the heaven above and signs
on the earth below.’ (Acts 2:18-19, Joel 2:29-30). Jacob Boehme’s English disciple J.
Ellistone thus described signatures as ‘the language of Nature, which telleth for what
every thing is good and profitable’. But this language was to be understood only
through ‘the manifestation of that Spirit, which on the Day of Pentecost gave forth the
true sence and meaning of all Languages in one.’36
There remained a third, and less exciting, prospect for the recovery of Adamic or preBabel language, and that was the construction of an artificial language that possessed
some of the amenity of the original language of nature. To varying degrees the
universal language projects of the second half of the seventeenth century, the best
known of which are those of John Wilkins and George Dalgarno, represent attempts to
explore this third option. As we shall see, however, there was a sharp divergence
between the apocalyptically inspired aspirations of John Webster, and the more prosaic
and painstaking efforts of John Wilkins. The former sought an inspired, magical
language that would provide immediate access to the secrets of nature. The later
projects, however, relied upon human ingenuity and labour, and for the most part were
essays attempting to lay foundations for a future enterprise. Samuel Hartlib provided an
important connection between these two types of projects, because of his involvement
with both.37
The sense of urgency that attended all of these endeavours of the interregnum
enthusiasts inevitably led to a certain lack of discrimination. Virtually any form of
learning, provided that it was not scholastic, could find a place in the proposed reforms.
The chief commitment during this period was to eclecticism, and for this reason the
disparate ideas of Paracelsus, van Helmont, Jacob Boehme, Fludd, along with the
Cabbalists and Rosicrucians all found a place at the table.38 The chief criterion was that
of potential utility. This meant that while Bacon’s ideas about the organization of
scientific knowledge and his vision of a state-sponsored scientific organization were
always in the foreground, the content of his natural philosophy and his emphasis on the
importance of an evaluation of the competence of the mind and the senses receded.
Indeed Comenius himself had expressed dissatisfaction with the ponderous nature of
36
J. Ellistone in Boehme, Signatura Rerum, Sig a4r.
See Gerhard Strasser, ‘Closed and open languages: Samuel Hartlib’s involvement with
cryptology and universal languages’, in Greengrass et al. (eds.), Samuel Hartlib, pp. 151-161
38
Stephen Clucas, ‘In search of “The True Logick”: Methodological Eclecticism among the
“Baconian Reformers”’ in Greengrass et al., (eds.), Samuel Hartlib, pp. 51-74; Webster, Great
37
CHAPTER 5. THE INSTAURATION OF LEARNING
29
scientific advance under the Baconian regime. Thus Bacon was praised for having
established the method of an ‘artificial induction’, which Comenius conceded was ‘the
onely way to pierce through into the most abstruse secrets of Nature.’ But the specific
method of Bacon took too long, required onerous organization, and delivered results
that were uncertain: ‘But because this requireth the continuall industry of many men,
and ages, and is not merely laborious, but seemeth also to be uncertaine in the event and
successe thereof, hence it come to passé, that thought it be a most excellent invention,
yet the most part of men neglect it as unprofitable.’ Accordingly, Comenius looked
elsewhere, trusting that God might lend his direct assistance: ‘It will be therefore
requisite for us to search out some other more universall Rule, which perhaps God of his
great mercy will upon our diligent endeavour vouchsafe to reveal unto us.’39 The many
years of labour demanded by the Baconian programme could not be accommodated
within the contracted timetable of the puritan millenarians. Voracious consumers of any
kind of knowledge that seemed capable of improving the human lot, figures such as
Comenius, Hartlib, and Webster were strongly influenced by the utilitarian and
millenarian aspects of Bacon’s philosophy. But while they sought to realise the kinds of
practical arrangements and social organizations that Bacon had argued for, in their
impatience to regain an Edenic state they were less interested in the issue of human
nature itself, and in how its defects might have had a bearing on the acquisition of
knowledge.
With the Restoration of the monarchy in 1660, other features of the proposed Baconian
reforms came to the fore. In the middle decades of the century, the emphasis had been
utopian and forward-looking, with high expectations of an almost complete recovery of
Adamic knowledge. Following the Restoration, Adamic knowledge remained the focus,
but the prospects for its full recovery, and the time frame that this was thought to
involve were more conservative. To a degree, this development paralleled what had
taken place in Continental Europe in the previous century. In the first years of Luther’s
initial successes in Germany there had been high hopes that the reformation of religion
would usher in a new era with reformed political and educational structures. In their
more radical manifestations, these hopes culminated in the Peasants’ War (1524-5),
which ended in tragedy and disappointment. In the political sphere, as is well known,
Luther threw in his lot with the established political authorities rather than the leaders of
the rebellion. In the education realm, the Aristotelian method that had been reviled in
Instauration, p. 513.
39
Comenius, Reformation of Schooles, p. 35. Cf. Naturall Philosophie Reformed, Preface.
CHAPTER 5. THE INSTAURATION OF LEARNING
30
the first heady days of the Reformation, came to be firmly established in the Lutheran
universities as a means of imposing order on a curriculum that was in danger of
disintegrating under the weight of competing forms of knowledge and the kinds of
enthusiastic excesses that were associated with civil disorder.
The Restoration also brought in its wake a renewed sense of the vanity of human
aspirations. The events of the civil war, now viewed through a Royalist lens, seemed to
confirm the puritans’ own views about the inherent limitations of human nature. Now,
however, there was no moderating eschatological optimism. Thus while it may seem
natural that the Restoration would see some diminution in the emphasis on the depravity
on the human condition, if anything, the reverse was the case. The Restoration, writes
W. M. Spellman, ‘witnessed a resurgence of a view of man which placed sin at the
forefront of all theological discussions’. The major theological development of the
period witnessed an attempt ‘to restore the primitive simplicity of the Christian Fall
story.’40 By the same token, there was a significant degree of continuity between the
scientific impulses of the Commonwealth period and those of the Restoration. For
understandable tactical reasons, restoration proponents of experimental philosophy
tended to distance themselves from the excesses of the Commonwealth period, typically
claiming Bacon as their intellectual progenitor, and silently passing over the various
applications of his programme that intervened between Bacon’s death and the
Restoration.41 In fact, many of the goals of the ‘projectors’ of the Commonwealth
period would be realised, albeit in a somewhat different form, by the Royal Society.
III. SOLOMON’S HOUSE
The Royal Society of London was officially incorporated on 15 July, 1662. From its
earliest days, many of its fellows regarded the Society as an embodiment of the
scientific ideals of Bacon’s ‘House of Salomon’. In his apologetic History of the Royal
Society (1667), Thomas Sprat declared that Bacon was ‘the one great Man, who had the
Imagination of the whole extent of the enterprise’, and while the early Society was by
no means uniform in its philosophical commitments, the figure most frequently invoked
as its ideological patron was Francis Bacon.42 In November of the year of the Royal
Society’s incorporation, Robert Hooke (1635-1703) was appointed curator of
40
Spellman, The Latitudinarians, p. 55. See also Christopher Hill, ‘Sin and Society’, in Essays,
II, 117-40.
41
Webster, Great Instauration, pp. 492f. 499. Cf. Gaukroger, Francis Bacon, pp. 1f.
42
Sprat, History, p. 44. On the Baconianism of the Royal Society see Webster, Great
CHAPTER 5. THE INSTAURATION OF LEARNING
31
experiments for the group, and was charged with the task of preparing several
experiments to be performed on each occasion of the Society’s meeting. Eventually
Hooke’s position attracted a salary of £80 per year, making him, in effect, the first
professional research scientist.43 While Hooke’s status within the Society may not have
been as elevated as that of such luminaries as Robert Boyle, his role placed him at the
centre of its activities. In his experimental labours, moreover, he clearly sought to put
into practice the principles articulated in Bacon’s writings, while in his written works he
re-enunciated those same principles. His posthumously published essay, bearing the
lengthy but informative title—A General Scheme, or Idea of the Present State of
Natural Philosophy, and how its defects may be remedied by a methodical proceeding
in the making experiments and collecting observations, whereby to compile a natural
history, as the solid basis for the superstructure of true philosophy—has been aptly
described by Patir Pugliense as ‘the most compelling rendition of Baconian principles
into a solid programme of scientific investigation.’44 Sadly, Hooke’s difficult
personality and his propensity to alienate influential individuals—most notable amongst
them Isaac Newton—have meant that only now is Hooke taking his rightful place as one
of the founding fathers of experimental science.45
In the Micrographia, one of the two first publications of the Royal Society, we
encounter what is perhaps the most clear and concise account of the Baconian
understanding of the relation between experimental natural philosophy and the fallen
condition of human beings. Every man, Hooke wrote, ‘both from a deriv’d corruption,
innate and born with him, and from his breeding and converse with men, is very subject
to slip into all sorts of errors.’ The path to avoiding these errors lay in identifying the
faculties responsible for knowledge and in rectifying their operations: ‘The only way
which now remains for us to recover some degree of those former perfections, seems to
be by rectifying the operations of the Sense, the Memory, and Reason.’ These, of
course, were the three faculties identified by Bacon. Armed with this proper
understanding of the workings of the mind, the inquirer must seek their specific
Instauration, pp. 88-99, 161, 491-6.
43
Lisa Jardine, The Curious Life of Robert Hooke: The Man who Measured London (San
Francisco: HarperCollins, 2004), pp. 97, 236f. Most fellows of the Royal Society were
amateurs, in contrast to the Académie Royale des Sciences which was funded by the crown, and
whose members were professional researchers.
44
Patri Pugliese, ‘Robert Hooke (1635-1703)’, ODNB.
45
Among recent attempts to provide Hooke with a more fittingly prominent place in the history
of experimental science, see Jardine, The Curious Life of Robert Hooke; Jim Bennett et al.,
London’s Leonardo: The Life and Works of Robert Hooke (Oxford, 2003); Stephen Inwood, The
Forgotten Genius (London, 2004).
CHAPTER 5. THE INSTAURATION OF LEARNING
32
deficiencies. Our preliminary task, Hooke wrote, is to ‘recollect their several defects, so
that we may better understand how to supply them, and by what assistances we may
enlarge their power.’ Taken together, these ‘assistances’ amount to the programme of
experimental philosophy: ‘These being the dangers in the process of humane reason, the
remedies of them all can only proceed from the real, the mechanical, the experimental
philosophy.’46 The argument is reiterated in The Present State of Natural Philosophy,
where Hooke observes that ‘the Intellect is not to be suffer’d to act without its Helps,
but is continually to be assisted by some Method or Engine’. Again, the first step in
developing such a method involves ‘an examination of the Constitution and Powers of
the Soul, or an Attempt of Disclosing the Soul to itself being an Endeavour of
Discovering the Perfections and Imperfections of Humane Nature.’47
Having surveyed the relevant ‘powers of the soul’ Hooke found himself agreeing with
Bacon that the immediate representations made by a fallen nature to human senses are
deceptive. Nature seemed ‘to use some kind of art in indeavouring to avoid our
discovery’. For this reason nature was to be investigated when ‘she seems to be put to
her shifts, to make many doublings and turnings’.48 Nature, in short, was to be put to
the test under the more stringent conditions of experiment. In addressing the need to
reform the senses, Hooke stressed far more than Bacon the importance of instruments.
By means of the use of ‘artificial instruments’, Hooke thought, there may be ‘a
reparation made for mischiefs, and imperfections which mankind has drawn upon
itself.’ Hooke referred specifically to the telescope and the microscope, the successes of
the former being better established than in Bacon’s era. As for the latter, Hooke helped
secure the place of microscopic observation in the sphere of the natural sciences.
Encouraged by pioneering efforts in the application of these artificial instruments to the
visual realm, Hooke expressed a firm hope ‘that there may be found many mechanical
inventions to improve our other Senses, of hearing, smelling, tasting, touching.’49
Hooke also attended closely to the corporate elements of the Baconian programme,
seeing in the collective and cumulative industry of the new Society the prospects of
46
Hooke, Micrographia, Preface (unpaginated). The Fall was considered to be responsible for
both ‘innate’ corruption and that owing to ‘converse with men’. The corrupting influences of
‘converse with men’ (which relate to Bacon’s idols of the marketplace and of the theatre) were
usually regarded as indirect consequences of the Fall. See, e.g., Ferguson, Interest of Reason in
Religion.
47
Hooke, The Present State of Natural Philosophy, p. 7, in The Posthumous Works of Robert
Hooke, ed. R. Waller, (London, 1705).
48
Hooke, Micrographia, Preface. Cf. Glanvill, Scepsis Scientifica, sig. b2v-b3r.
49
Ibid. Cf. Power, Experimental Philosophy, Sig. C3v.
CHAPTER 5. THE INSTAURATION OF LEARNING
33
overcoming the ‘slipperness and delusion of our memory’. Certainly he viewed his
own efforts in this light. The detailed descriptions provided in Microcosmographia he
regarded as a modest contribution to ‘the foundations whereon others may raise nobler
Superstructures’. This long-term success of experimental natural philosophy depended
on the co-ordination of many sets of such observations on a variety of topics that were
to be specified in advance and compiled under particular headings. Following Bacon’s
terminology, Hooke spoke of ‘the ‘compiling of a Naturall and Artificial History’ which
involved ‘ranging and registering … Particulars into Philosophical Tables, as may make
them most useful for the raising of Axioms and Theories.’50 The unofficial journal of
the Society—the Philosophical Transactions, launched in 1665 by Henry Oldenburg—
also helped fulfil this function, bringing together reports of experiments and
observations from fellows and numerous distinguished foreign correspondents. The
very first issue contained a contribution by Hooke, and over the next few years virtually
every major scientific figure of the period was represented in its pages. It remains the
oldest continually published scientific journal in Europe and played a pioneering role in
establishing natural science as the communal product of an international community.51
The idea that an improved natural philosophy necessitated a proper ‘ranking and
registering’ of particulars also found concrete realization in the taxonomic tables of the
language projects of Dalgarno, Wilkins, and others.52
Another early fellow of the Royal Society and one its most vocal champions, the
Anglican Divine Joseph Glanvill (1636-80), also wrote at length on the link between the
prescriptions of experimental natural philosophy and the Fall of the human race. His
first book, The Vanity of Dogmatizing (1661)—a work that was revised and published
under various titles throughout his life—was an attack on the Aristotelian scholasticism
that he had encountered as a student at Oxford in the 1650s. Certain knowledge of
nature, Glanvill insisted, had been possible only in Eden, hence the dogmatism of
scholastically inclined natural philosophers was completely unwarranted. While
Glanvill is typically associated with the Cambridge Platonists and the Latitudinarians,
both of which are generally characterised as having a more positive view of human
nature than the puritans, he nonetheless took very seriously the ramifications of sin in
the realm of natural philosophy. Thus, the Fall is singled out as the ‘general reason’ for
50
Ibid. Cf. Hooke, Present State of Natural Philosophy, p. 7.
The Journal des sçavans (Journal of savants) can lay claim to being the first scientific journal
in the world, appearing in January 1665, two months before the Philosophical Transactions.
52
In keeping with the views of the language projectors, Hooke points out that ‘Words being ill
set Marks on very confused Notions; the Reason of a Man is very easily impos’d on by
51
CHAPTER 5. THE INSTAURATION OF LEARNING
34
our ‘intellectual disabilities’. Glanvill also takes it to be virtually self-evident that
something is fundamentally wrong with the human mind, the ‘disease of our
intellectuals’, as he put it, being ‘too great not to be its own diagnostick’.53 In keeping
with the common verdict of the moral philosophers, he asserted that the mind of Adam,
in its innocent state, was a model of proper hierarchical relations: ‘Passions kept their
place, as servants of the higher powers, and durst not arrogate the Throne, as now.’
With Adam’s revolt against God, the insurrection of the passions destroyed forever the
inner harmony that made perfect knowledge possible. ‘Man was never at odds with
himself’, Glanvill observed, ‘till he was at odds with the commands of his Maker.’
Thereupon, the mind fell out of tune—‘There was no jarring or disharmony in the
faculties, till sin untun’d them.’54 The rule of the passions could be represented, as it
had been by Philo, by Eve’s persuasion of Adam on their first day in Eden. ‘The
Woman in us’, Glanvill explained, ‘still prosecutes a deceit, like that begun in the
Garden.’ While we continue to judge things according to the false witness of the ‘fond
Feminine’ we are destined to remain in ignorance.55
Much of Glanvill’s attention focused upon Adam’s sensory abilities, and how they had
come to be vastly diminished. In Eden, he wrote, ‘the senses, the Soul’s windows, were
without any spot or opacity.’ As a consequence, Adam probably knew of the motion of
the earth and the true relative dimensions of the heavenly bodies. ‘The acuteness of his
natural Opticks’, Glanvill speculated, ‘shew’d him much of the Coelestial magnificence
and bravery without a Galileo’s tube.’56 In his terrestrial environment, Adam was no
less capable, and could see ‘the motion of the bloud and spirits through the transparent
skin’ and could by sensible perception know the causes of such obscure phenomena as
magnetic attraction and the fluxes of the tides.57 Glanvill concluded that the first man’s
sensory apparatus ‘must needs infinitely more transcend ours.’58 From this analysis
there followed the now familiar explanation of the need for ‘helps’ to be applied to
minimize the limitations of fallen minds and bodies: ‘now our senses being scant and
Discourse.’ Present State of Natural Philosophy, p. 11.
53
Glanvill, Vanity of Dognmatizing, pp. 62f. Cf. Scepsis Scientifica, p. 48.
54
Ibid., p. 4. Cf. pp. 13, 87, 91, 118; ‘Against Confidence in Philosophy’, p. 30, in Essays on
Several Important Subjects in Philosophy and Religion (London, 1676).
55
Ibid., p. 118. Cf. pp. 125, 135, Scepsis Scientifica, pp. 99f.; ‘Against Confidence in
Philosophy’, p. 23, in Essays. Henry More has a similar view: ‘Now the feminine part in Adam
was so tickled with the Doctrine of the old Deceiver, that the Concupiscible began to be so
immoderate, as to resolve to do any thing that may promote pleasure and experience in things.’
Conjectura Cabbalistica, p. 46; cf. p. 71.
56
Ibid., pp. 1, 5.
57
Ibid., pp. 6-8.
58
Ibid., p. 5. Cf. Philo, Quaestiones in Genesin, I. 32.
CHAPTER 5. THE INSTAURATION OF LEARNING
35
limited, and Natures operations subtil and various; they must needs transcend and outrun our faculties.’ Our ‘deceitful and fallacious’ senses ‘must be assisted with
Instruments, that may strengthen and rectifie their Operations.’59 Five instruments in
particular were thought by Glanvill to have partially compensated for the loss of
Adamic abilities— the telescope, microscope, thermometer, barometer, and air pump.60
Thus were the discoveries of Galileo, Hooke, Pascal, and Boyle attributed to their
realization of the need to supply the wants of weakened senses.
The frailty of the memory and the problem of gaps in the chain of transmission of
knowledge were also taken up by Glanvill in a characteristically Baconian way. These
failings were to be redressed by the establishment of organizations capable of coordinating the labours of successive generations of investigators. Not surprisingly,
Glanvill believed that the Royal Society would play a leading role in this process. But
Glanvill also believed that other modern inventions could make significant contributions
on this score. The printing press, for example, had made the recording and distribution
of knowledge a far more efficient process, while the compass had improved navigation
and hence the geographical range of natural knowledge.61 Still, the advancement of
learning was to be a slow and incremental process, and for Glanvill all that could be
expected of the present generation of philosophers was an instituting of the basic
structures and methods that would establish the pattern for future centuries. Glanvill’s
assessment of the likely achievements of the Royal Society were accordingly modest:
‘and what one Age can do in so immense an Undertaking as That, wherein all the
generations of men are concerned, can be little more than to remove the rubbish, lay in
Materials, and put things in Order for the Building.’62
Part of the apparent modesty of Glanvill’s ambitions is to be attributed to the fact that he
was sensitive to growing criticisms of the record of the Royal Society in the decades
immediately following its incorporation. The standard complaint, voiced from the late
1660s, was that this august body had actually produced very little knowledge that was of
any use.63 But equally important was the fact that Glanvill was deliberately
59
Ibid., p. 67; ‘Modern Improvements of Useful Knowledge’, p. 23, in Essays. Cf. Plus Ultra,
pp. 52f.
60
Glanvill, ‘Modern Improvements in Useful Knowledge’, p. 23, in Essays.
61
Ibid., p. 31.
62
Glanvill, Plus Ultra, p. 91. Locke would later use a similar image to describe his efforts.
Essay, Epistle to the Reader, I, 14.
63
Prominent critics were Meric Casaubon, A Letter of Meric Casaubon, D.D. &c. to Peter du
Moulin D.D., concerning Natural Experimental Philosophie (Cambridge, 1669), and Henry
Stubbe, Legends no Histories: or a Specimen of some Animadversions upon the History of the
CHAPTER 5. THE INSTAURATION OF LEARNING
36
distinguishing between an ‘experimental’ philosophy, which in his view was grounded
in a realistic estimate of human capabilities, and a ‘dogmatic’ philosophy, identified
with the Aristotelian tradition which was presumed to have vastly overestimated the
powers of the human mind. Glanvill asserted that ‘the Free and Real philosophy makes
men deeply sensible of the infirmities of the humane intellect, and out manifold hazards
of mistaking and so renders them wary and modest, diffident of the certainty of their
Conceptions, and averse to the boldness of peremptory asserting.’64 By way of contrast,
the ‘voluminous Schoolmen, and Peripatetical Dictators’ seemed oblivious to ‘the
shortness of our intellectual sight, the deceptibility and imposition of our senses, the
tumultuary disorders of our passions’. And with their ‘shallow, unimprov’d intellects’,
it was these figures who were ‘confident pretenders to certainty’.65 In fact, Aristotle’s
philosophy was ‘founded on vulgarities’, dealing only with ‘the unexamin’d prejudices
of Sense’—all the less reason for modern philosophers to admire him as if he were
‘Seths Pillars, on which all knowledge is engraven’.66 The failings of the peripatetic
philosophy, moreover, were moral as well as epistemological. The same pride that had
prompted Adam’s fall had blinded philosophers to their own limitations. Pride had also
motivated their dogmatic confidence in their own edicts. ‘Tis Pride, and Presumption of
ones self that causeth such fowardness and assurance’, Glanvill cautioned, ‘and where
those reign, there is neither Vertue nor Reason; No regular Government, but a miserable
Tyranny of Passion and Self-Will.’67 In light of these disabilities, known through
revelation and confirmed through careful self-examination, what was called for was a
philosophy that threaded the narrow path between scepticism and dogmatism.
Experimental philosophy had this virtue and was thus fitly described as a philosophy
‘that becomes the sons of Adam.’68
John Wilkins (1614-72) was a founding fellow of the Royal Society. Indeed, he chaired
its first official meeting. Wilkins had been a leading figure in ‘the Invisible College’, a
precursor to the Royal Society that met in London and Oxford in the 1640s and 50s.
Royal Society… together with the Plus Ultra reduced to a Non-Plus (London, 1670). For a
discussion of these critiques see Harrison, ‘“The Fashioned Image or Poetry or the Regular
Instruction of Philosophy?”: Truth, Utility, and the Natural Sciences in Early Modern England’,
in D. Burchill and J. Cummins (eds.), Science, Literature, and Rhetoric in Early Modern
England (Aldershot, 2006); Michael Hunter, Science and Society in Restoration England
(Cambridge, 1981), ch. 4.
64
Glanvill, Plus Ultra, pp. 146f. Cf. ‘The Usefulness of Real Philosophy to Religion’, p. 26, in
Essays.
65
Glanvill, Vanity of Dogmatizing, pp. 13, 14f.
66
Ibid., pp. 73, 177, 138.
67
Glanvill, ‘Against Confidence in Philosophy’, p. 30, in Essays.
68
Glanvill, Vanity of Dogmatizing, p. 223.
CHAPTER 5. THE INSTAURATION OF LEARNING
37
Included in its membership were Robert Boyle, John Wallis, John Evelyn, Christopher
Wren, and William Petty—individuals who, like Wilkins, were also destined to play
major roles in the early Royal Society.69 Much of Wilkins’ renown rests upon his Essay
Towards a Real Character and a Philosophical Language (London, 1668) which was
devoted to the development of an artificial language, but his contributions extend well
beyond this. He had been an early and influential populariser of the Copernican system
and when in 1649 he assumed the position of Warden of Wadham College he succeeded
in transforming the Oxford college into an important centre for the new philosophy.
Hooke generously observed in this connection that ‘whereever he had lived, there had
been the chief Seat of generous Knowledge and true Philosophy.’70 Wilkins also played
a significant role in the composition of Sprat’s History, a work that was less of a history
than an articulation of the basic philosophy of the group, and a defence against the kinds
of accusations that Glanvill had been concerned to address.71
If Hooke and Glanvill had stressed the importance of supplying ‘helps’ for fallen senses,
Wilkins sought to alleviate the effects of the Fall on our ability to retain and
communicate knowledge. ‘After the fall of Adam’, he pointed out, ‘there were two
general curses inflicted on mankind: the one upon their labours, the other upon their
language.’72 Wilkins focused his efforts on the ‘second curse’. Bacon, as we have
seen, spoke of two losses associated with the Fall: the loss of ‘innocency’ and the loss of
‘dominion.’ The first was to be repaired by religion, the second by arts and sciences.
Wilkins agreed with Bacon that ‘arts and professions’ were the way to address the loss
of human dominion. ‘Artificial experiments’, he wrote, are ‘so many Essays, whereby
men doe naturally attempt to restore themselves from the first general curse inflicted
upon their labours.’73 Bacon, however, had also spoken of a ‘second general curse’, for
which the best available remedy was the cultivation of the art of grammar.74 This was a
piecemeal solution, however, and the inherent ambiguities of language were primarily
responsible for Bacon’s ‘the idols of the marketplace’. Wilkins took it upon himself to
find a specific ‘help’ that would moderate the unfortunate consequences of this second
69
On the early history of the society see Michael Hunter, The Royal Society and its fellows
1660-1700 (London, 1982), and R. Lomas, The Invisible College (London, 2002).
70
Hooke, Micrographia, Preface.
71
Paul Wood, “Methodology and Apologetics: Thomas Sprat’s History of the Royal Society,”
BJHS 13 (1980), 1-26.
72
Wilkins, Mercury, p. 53. For a summary of Wilkins’ views see his Discourse concerning the
Gift of Prayer, (London, 1651), pp. 74-80. Here Wilkins notes that the Fall brought about
depravity of understandings, consciences, affections, wills, and memories. (p. 77)
73
Wilkins, Mathematicall Magick. or, The Wonders That may be performed by Mechanical
Geometry (London, 1648), p. 2.
CHAPTER 5. THE INSTAURATION OF LEARNING
38
curse. Traditionally, the fractured state of human discourse was attributed to the
confusion of tongues at Babel. This event provided the historical explanation for the
diversity of languages and to a degree also explained their arbitrary nature. Babel was
also significant because the loss of the primitive language necessarily brought with it the
loss of whatever fragments of Adamic knowledge were not part of the collective
memory. The ‘ill conjunction of labours’, which Bacon had identified as a major
impediment to learning (along with ‘ill tradition of knowledge’), could also be linked to
the Babel event, for the confusion of tongues brought to a premature end the first cooperative technological undertaking in human history. In practice, the curse on human
language was often regarded as a later manifestation of the curse placed on Adam and
Eve immediately after the Fall. The fourth-century Christian poet Prudentius had long
before made the fall of language contemporary with Adam’s sin, rather than postponing
it until Babel. The chasm which separates language and truth resulted from original
sin, and the polyvalence of language thereafter, is symbolized by the forked tongue of
the serpent.75 In Paradise Lost, Milton was thus to suggest that the Fall had infected
Adam’s thoughts, looks, actions, and crucially, his words.76 In any event, if the Adamic
names and the form of writing that preserved them had persisted after the Fall, these
were presumed to have been lost at Babel. 77 And even if these vestiges of the Adamic
language had survived the calamity at Babel—preserved in Hebrew letters, Egyptian
hieroglyphs or Chinese idiograms—the forms of these latter-day languages were widely
acknowledged to have been significantly corrupted. To simplify matters somewhat, if
language can be said to have both representational and communicative capacities, the
former were thought to have been damaged by the Fall, the latter by what transpired at
Babel.
Some compensation for the confusion of tongues, and hence for the loss of
communicative facility of the original tongue, was already provided by Latin, the
universal language of the scholarly community of the West. But the prestige of Latin
74
Bacon, Advancement, II.xvi.4 (p. 132.)
Martha Malamud, ‘Writing Original Sin’, Journal of Early Christian Studies 10 (2002), 32960; Michael Roberts, Poetry and the Cult of the Martyrs: The Liber Peristephanon of Prudentius
(Ann Arbor, 1993).
76
Milton, Paradise Lost X.608. See also John Leonard, ‘Language and Knowledge in Paradise
Lost’, Cambridge Companion to Milton (Cambridge, 1989), pp. 97-111; William Poole, ‘The
Divine and the Grammarian: Theological Disputes in the 17th-Century Universal Language
Movement’, Historiographia Linguistica 30 (2003), 273-300; Cram and Maat (eds.), George
Dalgarno, pp. 3f.
77
Thus Wilkins: ‘The difference of characters, whereby several languages are expressed, is part
of the second general curse in the confusion of tongues; for as before there was but one way of
speaking, so also but one way of writing.’ Mercury, p. 43.
75
CHAPTER 5. THE INSTAURATION OF LEARNING
39
had been under threat for some time. The interest of the humanist scholars in the
original languages of the classics and the new Protestant focus on the biblical text had
significantly raised the profiles of Greek and Hebrew. Increasingly, moreover,
vernacular languages were becoming important media for the exchange of ideas. The
Protestant Reformers had energetically promoted new translations of the bible as
alternatives to official authoritative text, the Latin Vulgate. Latin was in any case
tainted on account of its association with the rituals and administrative apparatus of the
Roman Church.78 In the sphere of the sciences, Galileo, Bacon, and Descartes had all
written in the vernacular, again, to broaden the appeal of their revolutionary ideas. And
of course it served the commercial interests of presses and the apologetic agendas of
reformers of both religion and science to reach as wide an audience as possible. These
pressures led to a considerable erosion of the dominance of Latin in the realm of print.
In any case, Latin had proven itself to be in many respects a most imperfect medium for
the expression of ideas, both religious and scientific. In the sixteenth century, humanist
philologists and Protestant reformers had discovered that there were major discrepancies
between the assumed meanings of central theological terms and the original Greek
expressions of which they were supposed to be translations. Some of the most
contentious doctrinal debates of the Reformation were to do with the meanings of the
words of the Greek New Testament, and such fundamental terms as ‘justification’,
‘repentance’, and ‘ordination’ became linguistic battlefields.79 Considerations such as
these account for Wilkins’ deep conviction, shared with many of those who invested
time in similar projects, that a real character would ‘contribute much to the clearing of
some our modern differences in Religion.’80 The sciences were also confronted with
issues of translation, particularly in the discipline of natural history. Compilers of
herbals found themselves having to identify plant species from Latin names that were
translations of Greek terms taken from the classical references, often with a third
language such as Arabic intervening between the Greek original and Latin name.81
Thus for both theologians and natural historians Latin could be the problem, rather than
the solution.
78
Introduction, Vivian Salmon (ed.), The Works of Francis Lodwick: A study of his writings in
the intellectual context of the seventeenth century (London, 1972), pp. 46-8.
79
See Harrison, Bible and the Rise of Science, pp. 95-9.
80
Wilkins, Essay, Epistle Dedicatory. Cf. Comenius, for whom religious differences often
consist ‘not in fundamentals, only in the manner of expressing them.’ The Way of Light of
Comenius, tr. E. Campagnac (London, 1938), p. 198. Consider, too, Dalgarno’s lexicon of
religious terms in Ars Signorum. See also Benjamin DeMott, ‘Comenius and the Real
Character’, PMLA 70 (1955), 1068-81.
81
Jerry Stannard, ‘Medieval Herbals and their Development’, Clio Media 9 (1974), 23-33.
CHAPTER 5. THE INSTAURATION OF LEARNING
40
As we have already seen, some of the radical Baconians of the Commonwealth period
had taken up the challenge provided by the ‘second curse’, pursuing the recovery of the
primitive language and the wisdom embedded within it through the doctrine of
signatures and their investigations of the Cabbala. Wilkins, however, had little time for
this project:
And if you will believe the Jews, the holy spirit hath purposely involved in the
words of scripture, every secret that belongs to any art or science, under such
cabalisms as these. And if a man were but expert in unfolding of them, [sic] it
were easy for him to get as much knowledge as Adam had in his innocency, or
human nature is capable of.82
On balance, Wilkins seemed not to believe this. He was not so much sceptical of the
tradition of Adam’s encyclopaedic knowledge, however, as he was of the cabalists’
claims to be able to recover that knowledge from the words of the Hebrew Bible. There
were indeed some particular instances where words of scripture may conceal genuine
truths about nature, he conceded, but the general assumption that all scripture could be
used for this purpose had given licence to ‘men’s roving and corrupt fansies’ and
occasioned ‘many wild and strange absurdities.’83 Wilkins’ rejection of the kinds of
linguistic reforms recommended by Webster were consistent with his general position
that while there was room for modernization of the curriculum, it was not to be along
the lines set out by its more radical critics.
Wilkins’ partner in the defence of the universities was astronomer Seth Ward (1617-89).
Indeed, Ward had much in common with Wilkins: they shared an enthusiasm for the
new science and Copernican astronomy; they were both founding fellows of the Royal
Society, and subsequently Fellows of Wadham College; both, in time, were elevated to
the episcopate. In Vindiciae Academiarum (1654), written in close collaboration with
Wilkins, Ward expressed similar reservations about Webster’s attempts to revive an
Adamic language. The schoolmaster was derided as a ‘credulous fanatick Reformer’
given to ‘canting discourse about the language of nature.’ In Ward’s view, Webster’s
‘peevish malcontented humour had brought him into the gang of the vulgar Levellers.’84
With the restoration of the monarchy, interest in these more ambitious projects waned as
they came to be associated with the radical millenarian politics of the revolutionary era.
Ironically, however, both Ward and Wilkins had an abiding interest in natural language
schemes and if they did not share the mystical enthusiasms of Webster, Boehme, and
82
83
84
John Wilkins, Mercury, I, 41
Ibid., 41f.
Ward, Vindiciae Academiarum (Oxford, 1654), pp. 5-6.
41
CHAPTER 5. THE INSTAURATION OF LEARNING
Fludd, they nonetheless saw in natural or philosophical languages prospects for the
furthering of knowledge.
Another associate of Wilkins who was a central figure in the natural language
movements of the second half of the century was George Dalgarno (c.1616-1687).85
A
teacher at a private grammar school in Oxford, Dalgarno was proficient in shorthand
and had trialled various ways of improving it. These efforts brought him to the attention
of Samuel Hartlib, who suggested that with further modifications Dalgarno’s version of
brachygraphy could be developed into a real character that might provide the basis of a
new form of scientific notation. The young schoolmaster was soon drawn into the orbit
of John Wilkins, and with the encouragement of Seth Ward and the mathematician John
Wallis, they began work on a collaborative endeavour to develop a philosophical
language and a real character. Eventually, Wilkins and Dalgarno fell out over details of
the proposed scheme. Concerned to establish a claim for priority, Dalgarno hurried
into print with Ars signorum (‘The Art of Signs’, 1661), which lays out his model for a
philosophical language.
As it turned out, his haste proved to be wasted effort.
Whatever the merits of Dalgarno’s work, and they were not inconsiderable, it was
destined to be almost completely eclipsed by Wilkins’ Essay, which appeared seven
years later in a handsome folio edition and with much fanfare. From that time until very
recently Dalgarno’s work has been overshadowed by that of Wilkins. In a sad irony, the
only recorded use of Dalgarno’s language was by Roger Daniel, who ungenerously
described its inventor as nhkpim sufa—‘the greatest ass’.86
Wilkins’ own scheme was presented as a realization of particular aspects of the
Baconian project, the Essay being intended to provide ‘helps and assistances’ to the
memory and understanding: ‘besides the best way of helping the Memory by natural
Method, the Understanding likewise would be highly improved; and we should, by
learning the Character and the Names of things, be instructed likewise in their Natures,
the knowledge of both which ought to be conjoined.’87 The assistance to the
understanding was to be provided by the rational manner in which the various things to
be remembered were ordered, for the problem of memory was not simply one of
85
For biographical details see Cram and Matt, George Dalgarno, pp. 8-31; Rhodri Lewis, ‘John
Wilkins’s Essay (1668) and the context of seventeenth-century artificial languages in England’,
D.Phil. Thesis, Oxford, 2003, ch. 3.
86
Jaap Maat, Philosophical Languages in the Seventeenth Century: Dalgarno, Wilkins, Leibniz
(Dordrecht, 2004), p. 133. Much of the reason that Dalgarno has been ignored lies in the
mistaken view that Wilkins’ project is the more perfect realisation of what was essentially the
same project. See Maat, Philosophical Languages, pp. 31-37.
CHAPTER 5. THE INSTAURATION OF LEARNING
42
recording information, but of ordering it in such a way that it was accessible. Wilkins
ambitiously attempted ‘a regular enumeration and description of all those things and
notions, to which marks or names ought to be assigned according to their respective
natures’, his ultimate goal being ‘to reduce all things and notions into such a frame as
my express their natural order, dependence, and relations.’88 To help him complete the
biological classifications of this part of the project, he drew upon the taxonomic
expertise of John Ray and Francis Willoughby.
It is important to understand the ways in which Wilkins’ language project differs from
the earlier Cabbalistic, Paracelsian, and Boehmenist endeavours. While, broadly
speaking, their goals are expressed in terms of the need to recover the features of a
pristine ideal language , the earlier efforts sought to emulate Adam himself by seeking
out the primitive language and the secrets that supposedly were embedded within it.
Wilkins, Dalgarno, Lodwick, and other fellows of the Royal Society with an interest in
language schemes had more modest ambitions. As the telescope and the microscope
provided assistance to fallen senses, their proposed language sought to provide a ‘help’
for the memory and a means of bringing order to the linguistic confusion that inhibited
communication of scientific ideas and promoted religious discord. While the earlier
schemes such as Webster’s drew upon Baconian aspirations, ultimately they relied upon
supernatural inspiration for their success. Some commentators have suggested that the
best way to characterise the difference between the earlier and later language projects of
the seventeenth century is in terms of a shift of focus from the Fall to Babel. The more
optimistic enterprises of the Commonwealth period are regarded as having focused on
recapture of the past glories of a perfect Adamic language; the later projects are
concerned with the more modest task of overcoming the practical difficulties caused by
the multiplicity of languages.89 However, considerations relating to the Fall featured in
the later projects too, and in significant ways.
Dalgarno, for example, thought that it was important to have a proper understanding of
the Fall and its implications for the creation of a philosophical language. The
connections between the design of Ars signorum and sacred history are not explicitly
87
Wilkins, Essay, p. 21.
Ibid., p. 1.
89
See, e.g., Benjamin DeMott, ‘The Sources and Development of John Wilkins’ Philosophical
Language’, Journal and English and Germanic Philology 57 (1958), 1-13 (2); David Katz,
Philo-Semetism and the Readmission of the Jews to England 1603-1655 (Oxford: Clarendon,
1982), pp. 43-88. Cf. Poole, ‘The Divine and the Grammarian’, pp. 276f.; Lewis, ‘John
Wilkins’, pp. 263-81.
88
CHAPTER 5. THE INSTAURATION OF LEARNING
43
addressed in that work, but in a manuscript tract entitled ‘On Interpretation’, Dalgarno
helpfully provides them. Here he explores the common ground ‘wherein the Divine and
Grammarian seem equally concerned’—the Fall of Adam.90 In what is now a
predictable pattern, Dalgarno is interested in whether Adam’s mastery of language ‘was
a supernaturally inspired gift or a faculty proper to humane nature in its first perfection.’
Dalgarno’s preference is equally predictable: ‘Adam by the strength and excellency of
his natural faculties did himself invent the Language which he and Eve did then speak
without any supernatural assistance’.91 What is interesting about Dalgarno’s position is
that while he subscribes to the traditional view of Adamic wisdom—Adam was a ‘great
and perfect Philosopher’ and a ‘Master of Language’—the language used, or rather
invented, by Adam was in an important sense arbitrary: ‘tho I judge the first Language
was rational yet in some sense it might be called arbitrary, that is he had more ways than
one of expressing the same thing.’92 In this respect then, we are in a similar position to
that in which Adam found himself, inasmuch as the tokens we attach to objects are also
arbitrary. But there are still ways in which Adam’s language could be regarded as
perfect and that the name he used could be said to be expressive of the natures of things.
Both Wilkins and Dalgarno (and later, Leibniz), proposed for their language a set of
basic terms or ‘radicals’, arbitrarily assigned, to express various simple properties.
Things would then be named by compounds of these radicals, the composition of the
compound term reflecting the nature of thing. (Think here of how the term
‘philosophy’ captures the nature of the activity it describes—the love of wisdom—
because it combines philia (love) and sophia (wisdom). The elemental terms, however
cannot be further analysed in this way. Hence philia means ‘love’ and sophia means
‘wisdom’ only by convention.) Thus while the radicals were assigned to things
arbitrarily, the compound terms were genuinely expressive of the nature of things.93 In
following this procedure, Dalgarno thought himself to be emulating the process by
which the Adamic language was formulated, for in his view the names Adam gave to
the beasts were fitting because they were compound terms that expressed an appropriate
combination of properties: ‘Adam as a perfect philosopher following nature and the
90
‘On Interpretation’, On Universal Language, pp. 391-408 (p. 398). I am indebted to William
Poole for drawing this MS to my attention.
91
Ibid., p. 396 (my emhasis).
92
Dalgarno, ‘The Autobiographical Treatise’, ‘Of Interpretation’, in Cram and Maat (eds.),
George Dalgarno, pp. 368, 396. Dalgarno reported that Adam in his innocence enjoyed
‘perfection both of soule and body …. his natural faculties were clear and distinct, not subject
to error, but naturally illuminated with such a degree of knowledge that never any of his
posterity can arrive at or / so much comprehend what the extent of his knowledge was.’ ‘Of
Interpretation, Ibid., pp. 396f.
93
Maat, Philosophical Languages, p. 56. It should also be said that in Dalgarno’s system there
CHAPTER 5. THE INSTAURATION OF LEARNING
44
example of his maker gave names to all living creatures, not primitive and independent
words … but words of secondary institution inflected from other words, the primary and
proper sense of which contributed to the describing of the nature of the thing…. For
unless this be granted, the commone opinion of Adams giving names to all living
creatures suited to their natures will be absurd.’94 While the process of constructing a
rational language was the same then as it is now, Adam was presumably better at the
business of choosing an appropriate level of generality for his radical terms, and at
constructing combinations of these radicals to be expressive of the natures of things.
Adam also had the advantage of a photographic memory so that he could immediately
command an extensive vocabulary:
… images of things that wee impress upon material objects of sounds or
Characters by compact and so carry them in our memories and learn them by
Art and industry, all this he did by the natural strength of his faculties without
compact or study; all sounds and Characters then were indifferent to him but he
was better able then wee to chuse what was in all respects most convenient.
The reason of all this because all the knowledge that wee can possibly acquire
by labour and paines this and much more was in him naturally without any
thing of Labour or paine.95
The ‘labours and pains’ now required for the construction of such a language are
considerable, as anyone who has read Dalgarno and Wilkins can attest, and it is in these
labours and pains that we feel the effects of the curse. Having said this, Adam’s
abilities differ from ours only in degree and not kind, and hence a new formulation of an
Adamic-like language is to some degree within human capabilities.
It is likely that Dalgarno’s account of Adam’s naming also led to one of the major
differences between his scheme and that of Wilkins. In contrast to Wilkins, Dalgarno
attempted to minimize the number of radicals or ‘primitives’—a policy which would
necessarily maximise the number of compound terms. The reasoning behind this
strategy was that it is only the compound terms that are genuinely expressive of the
natures of things and that in their naming of things both God and Adam had used
compound terms.96 Modern Hebrew was thought to have still retained these
characteristics, having comparatively few simple and uncompounded roots.97 Decisions
were still logical links between related radicals. See Maat, pp. 83-91.
94
Dalgarno, ‘Of Interpretation’, in Cram and Maat (eds.), George Dalgarno, p. 388.
95
Ibid., p. 401.
96
Dalgarno, ‘The Art of Signs’, ‘Of Interpretation’, in Cram and Maat (eds.), George
Dalgarno, pp. 56, 388f.; Maat, Philosophical Languages, pp. 56f.
97
Wilkins had initially agreed that Hebrew would be a good model for a philosophical
language. Mercury, p. 57. Cf. Wilkins’ critic Thomas Baker: ‘The first language, the Hebrew
CHAPTER 5. THE INSTAURATION OF LEARNING
45
about the number of radicals were closely related to the issue of how to determine what
things or concepts were truly basic, a task that in principle rested on the division of the
whole of reality into its natural categories. This issue also proved to be contentious.
One of the most basic assumptions of the language schemes of the period was that
human beings agreed in their fundamental concepts of things, differing only in the
linguistic labels they attached to them.98 Because individuals share the same senses and
mental facilities, when they apprehend a particular object they form a common
conception of it. This was in essence the position that Aristotle had set out almost 2,000
years before in the opening lines of De Interpretatione: ‘Now spoken sounds are
symbols of affections in the soul, and written marks symbols of spoken sounds. And just
as written marks are not the same for all men, neither are spoken sounds. But what these
are in the first place signs of—affections of the soul—are the same for all; and what
these affections are likenesses of—actual things—are also the same.’99 In light of this
understanding of the relationship between things, concepts, and language, the aim of the
language projectors was to align the ‘affections of the soul’ that were common to all
with a set of symbols that would also be common to all. Wilkins sets out the plan of
the Essay in precisely these terms:
As men do generally agree in the same Principle of Reason, so do they likewise
agree in the same Internal Notion or Apprehension of things…. The Names
given to these in several Languages, are such arbitrary sounds or words, as
Nations of men have agreed upon, either casually or designedly, to express their
Mental notions of them. The Written word is the figure of picture of that sound.
So that if men should generally consent upon the same way or manner of
Expression as they do agree in the same Notion, we should then be freed from
that Curse in the Confusion of Tongues, with all the unhappy consequences of
it.100
All this was clear enough. The next logical step, as Wilkins explained, was to arrive at
‘a just Enumeration and description of such things or notions as are to have Marks or
Names assigned to them’, and it was here that the problems began.101
was very plain and simple (a good argument of its being an Original) consisting of very few
Roots, and those very simple and uncompounded.’ Reflections on Learning (London, 1699), pp.
7f.
98
Lewis, ‘John Wilkins’, ch. 4; Maat, Philosophical Languages, pp. 13-15, 21.
99
Aristotle, De Interpretatione 16a4-16a9 (Complete Works, p. 25)
100
Wilkins, Essay, p. 20.
101
Ibid.
46
CHAPTER 5. THE INSTAURATION OF LEARNING
The practicality of devising classificatory tables capable of accommodating all things or
concepts in a rational order presented Wilkins with difficulties that ultimately proved
insuperable. This was because such a scheme seemed to presuppose both that reality
could be so divided and, even more problematically, that those divisions were known in
advance. Critics of the Essay tended to highlight this apparent weakness. In his popular
Reflections upon Learning (1699) Thomas Baker claimed that the whole project was ‘an
impracticable thing’. If we are to have a language based on things rather than words, he
pointed out, ‘we must first be agreed about the nature of things, before we can fix Marks
and Characters to represent them, and I very much despair of such an agreement.’
Nature, he went on to say, ‘is an inexhaustible mine, where we may always dig and yet
never come at the bottom.’102 The incompleteness of human knowledge rendered
impossible the task of setting out its fundamental categories in advance. It must be said
that even those involved in the scheme were sympathetic to this general point. In his
private correspondence Ray declared himself to be ‘ashamed’ of the botanical taxonomy
he had contributed. He complained that in devising the tables he been unable to follow
‘nature’s lead’ being constrained instead by the author’s method. The whole vision of
constructing ‘exact Philosophical tables’ of anything was, in his view, highly
problematic.103
Puzzlingly, there is evidence that Wilkins, too, was aware of at least some of these
problems. At the very outset he conceded that the taxonomic scheme he was relying
on—in essence a modified table of Aristotelian predicaments—was defective and could
not extend to things that were as yet unknown. Indeed the perfection of such a scheme
was dependent on the perfection of philosophy itself, it being the task of philosophy, in
Wilkins’ view at least, ‘to reduce all things into such a frame, as may express their
natural order, dependence and relations.’ He was also in partial agreement with Ray,
that the biological taxonomies were artificial.104 Perhaps the best construction that can
be placed on Wilkins’ efforts is that he sought to establish the plausibility of framing a
universal language, fully cognizant of the fact that such a project could only be brought
to fulfilment with the perfection of philosophy itself—a task that he thought might be
102
Baker, Reflections on Learning, pp. 18, 76; Lewis, ‘John Wilkins’, p. 291. Descartes had
similarly thought that a true philosophical language presupposed a ‘true philosophy’, the
existence of which presumably would obviate the need for a philosophical language. Maat,
Philosophical Languages, pp. 27f.
103
Ray, Philosophical letters, p. 62, cited in Lewis, ‘John Wilkins’, pp. 303f. Cf. Benjamin
DeMott, ‘Science versus Mnemonics, Notes on John Ray and on John Wilkins’ Esssay towards
a Real Character, and a Philosophical Language’, Isis 48 (1957), 3-12.
104
Wilkins, Essay, sig. 1b, pp. 1, 67. See also Lewis, ‘John Wilkins’, pp. 241f.; Maat,
Philosophical Languages, pp. 156-9, 255-7.
47
CHAPTER 5. THE INSTAURATION OF LEARNING
left to his colleagues in the Royal Society. Wilkins’ project was, after all, an ‘essay’:
the first rather than the final word. In favour of the scheme was the witness of Aristotle
(which for many, admittedly, would count against it). But it was not unreasonable to
assume that God had imposed a rational order on the natural world, that it was the task
of natural philosophy to discover this order, and that its disclosure would count as
evidence of divine wisdom.105 Adam’s naming of the beasts was also a relevant
consideration, for if the beasts had been given names according to their natures, and if
this had been accomplished by natural means, it could be argued that there did in fact
exist such natures in the world.
In the early eighteenth century Wilkins’ attempts to frame a philosophical language
were savagely satirized in Jonathan Swift’s ‘Academy of Lagado’, where men carry
around objects for use instead of words, ‘since words are only names for things.’ These
objects, the reader is informed, ‘would serve as an universal language.’106
While Swift
may be the best-known critic of Wilkins’ scheme, reservations had been expressed
almost from the moment of its publication. Some theologically motivated critics
wondered whether repairing the ruins of Babel was such a good idea, given the fate of
the original project.107 It was not difficult to argue that in attempting to reverse the
effects of the curse on language, Wilkins was simply rehearsing the proud ambition of
the Babels’ original architects. Wilkins’ latitudinarianism, a view generally associated
with which a marginally more generous view of human nature than prevailing versions
of Calvinism, may have had something to do with these criticisms.108 These challenges
aside, there was a deep tension between Wilkins’ aims and the means by which he
attempted to realise them. His basic dilemma was that while his goals were directly
linked to Baconian aspirations to reverse those ‘curses’ that had attended human sin, his
proposed remedy seemed to ignore the consequences of those curses, at least as they
were typically understood. In certain respects Wilkins’ resort to aspects of
Aristotelianism was inconsistent with the Baconian analysis of human defects.
Arguably, in his invocation of Aristotelian categories he was committing the error of
105
Lewis plausibly suggests this as a motivation for Hooke’s ‘philosophical algebra’, ‘John
Wilkins’, pp. 225f.
106
Swift, Gulliver’s Travels, part III, ch. 4.
107
Thus Baker: ‘The Divisions of Tongues was [sic] inflicted by God as a Curse upon humane
Ambition, and may have been continued since for the same reason; and as no Remedy has been
yet found, so it is most probable, it is not to be expected, nor are we to hope to unite that which
God had divided.’ Reflections on Learning, p. 19. Cf. Casaubon, A Letter, pp. 35f.
108
Latitudinarians were nonetheless firmly committed to the doctrine of the Fall and can be
regarded as ‘largely co-extensive with the puritan movement’. Webster, Great Instauration, p.
497; Spellman, The Latitudinarians, pp. 54-71; Marshall, John Locke: Resistance, Religion and
CHAPTER 5. THE INSTAURATION OF LEARNING
48
Aquinas in assuming that Aristotelianism was a theologically ‘neutral’ framework that
could be deployed unproblematically in a range of different contexts. In fact, the table
of Aristotelian predicaments rested on presuppositions that were compatible with
neither sacred history nor the new natural philosophy. Proponents of the latter were
uncomfortably aware of the impracticalities of identifying and naming the essences of
things. Ray, as we have already indicated, had little confidence in his own contribution,
and expressed doubts that the natures of things could be known in the kinds of way
demanded by Wilkins’ project. Robert Boyle shared this scepticism, suggesting that
the book of nature contained only ‘Aegyptian Hieroglyphicks’ and that many of its
secrets would remain forever hidden from fallen human minds.109 The corpuscular
philosophy championed by Boyle, moreover, was inconsistent with the idea that natural
objects could have genuine essences. The final word may be given to John Locke, who
echoed Boyle’s scepticism about the possibility of arriving at a true science of natural
bodies. Without naming names, Locke declared in his Essay concerning Human
Understanding (1690) that no one could attempt the perfect reformation of language
‘without rendring himself ridiculous.’110
IV. THE LIMITS OF REASON
Robert Boyle (1627-1691) and John Locke (1632-1704) had much more in common
than a shared sceptical attitude to philosophical language projects. Both have become
cherished emblems of human progress in their respective fields, and they enjoy
reputations as advocates of the dignity and reliability of human reason. In his
‘Preliminary Discourse’ to the Encyclopédie, Jean Le Rond d’Alembert hailed Locke as
the founder of ‘scientific philosophy’ while Voltaire referred to him as the ‘Hercules of
metaphysics’ who had slain the serpents of scholasticism.111 Robert Boyle is a
canonical figure in the history of science, ‘the father of modern chemistry’ and, as every
science student knows, the author of the eponymous law.112 These reputations have
important foundations in fact. Locke’s insistence on the natural liberty of human
Responsibility (Cambridge, 1994), p. 135; Marshall, ‘Locke and Latitudinarianism’.
109
Lewis, ‘John Wilkins’ Essay’, pp. 228, n.62, 247f., 306f.,
110
Locke, Essay, III.xi.2 (II, 148). There is some discussion of the extent to which Boyle and
Locke shared a common view of the arbitrary nature of classification. See Jan-Erik Jones,
‘Boyle, Classification, and the Workmanship of the Understanding Thesis’, Journal of the
History of Philosophy 43 (2005), 171-83.
111
W. M. Spellman, John Locke (New York, 1997), pp. 3f.
112
Some controversy exists over the naming rights to ‘Boyle’s Law’, there being a belated
French claimant, Edme Mariotte. Some have also thought that Hooke should have received
credit for his contribution to the discovery.
CHAPTER 5. THE INSTAURATION OF LEARNING
49
beings, his advocacy of government by the consent of the governed, his defence of
toleration, and his irenic and open-minded vision of Christianity, all support this
characterization. In the case of Boyle, the reasons are somewhat different, but equally
compelling. He was undoubtedly the leading exponent of experimental philosophy in
the seventeenth century, and while his religious commitments are well known, they are
generally regarded as being of the less extreme kind. Boyle is considered to be one of
the chief early modern advocates of the use of reason in the sphere of religion, largely
on account of his frequently stated belief that the study of nature provides persuasive
evidence of the existence of a wise and all-powerful Deity. Their rejection of Wilkins’
language scheme, however, provides us with a hint that their identification as
champions of the powers of unaided reason may need some modification. Indeed, in
spite of their reputations, both Boyle and Locke are to be located in the tradition of
theologically informed scepticism that we have been tracing in this chapter.
As Jan Wojcik has recently shown, the common reading of Boyle as an advocate of the
powers of reason in the spheres of religion and natural philosophy is somewhat
misleading.113 This is not the place to rehearse her arguments in detail, but given
Boyle’s prominence as an advocate of experimental philosophy, some comment on his
views about the Fall, human nature, and the limits of our knowledge is in order. Boyle’s
most direct statements on this topic are to be found in Some Considerations about the
Reconcileableness of Reason and Religion (1675). Here he sets out the familiar claim
that all human race is ‘embued with Prejudices, and Errors’ and that these typically
‘continue undiscern’d and consequently unreform’d.’114 Boyle enlists two modern
authors to support his views. The first, surprisingly perhaps, is Descartes, who is cited
to the effect that in the realm of philosophy we must always remember that we are finite
and God infinite. Boyle also makes reference to Descartes’ suggestion that a common
source of error are those prejudices acquired in infancy.115 The other modern, as we
might expect, was Bacon, whose doctrine of the ‘idols’ receives brief treatment. Boyle
then proceeds, in language reminiscent of Bacon, to explain that the human mind ‘is not
sincerely dispos’d to receive the light of Truth, but receives an infusion as it were of
adventitious Colours (the disguise the light) from the Will and Affections.’ Human
pride, moreover, prompts us to construct truth as we would want it to be, rather than as
it actually is. This takes Boyle back to what transpired in Eden:
113
Wojcik, Robert Boyle, esp. pp. 212-19.
Boyle, Reason and Religion, p. 28.
115
Ibid. p. 26. According to Henri Gouhier, Descartes’ account of infancy is a kind of
secularised doctrine of original sin. Henri Gouhier, Pensée métaphysique de Descartes.
114
CHAPTER 5. THE INSTAURATION OF LEARNING
50
And if we consider the inbred pride of man, which is such, that if we will
believe the Sacred story, ev’n Adam in Paradise affected to be like God
knowing good and evil, we shall not so much marvel, that almost every man in
particular makes the Notions he has entertain’d already, and his Senses, his
Inclinations and his Interests, the Standards by which he estimates and judges of
all other things, whether natural or reveal’d.
‘If we admit the fall of our first Parents’, Boyle continues, we will not be surprised to
discover that ‘our Passions and Interests, and oftentimes our Vices should pervert our
Intellects.’116
Boyle does admit the Fall, yet he was reluctant to attribute all the limitations of human
knowledge to Adam’s lapse. It is significant, for example, that he was cautious about
endorsing the tradition that accorded encyclopaedic knowledge to Adam. ‘I will not
urge the received Opinion of Divines’, he wrote in The Excellency of Theology (1674),
‘that before the Fall … Adam’s knowledge was such, that he was able at first sight of
them to give each of the Beasts a name expressive of their natures.’ Boyle’s
reservations on this point were owing to the fact that he had closely scrutinized the
Hebrew names of animals mentioned in Genesis without deriving any clearer insight
into nature than that with which he had begun.
He concluded that there was some
doubt that Adam’s knowledge in Paradise was equivalent to that ‘of the Saints in
Heaven.’117 In fact, earlier in the work he had implied that recent advances in the
sciences and arts had well surpassed anything that Adam could have accomplished. ‘If
Adam were now alive, and should survey that great variety of man's productions’, he
mused, ‘he would admire to see what a new world, as it were, or set of things has been
added to the primitive creatures by the industry of his posterity.’118 Boyle thus
dismissed a common view of the symmetry between the original knowledge of Adam
and that of the Saints in heaven. All terrestrial knowledge, including what Adam had
known in Paradise, was in his view necessarily limited by finitude. Only with the
resurrection would we come into possession of true science. At that time, just as our
natures would be completely renovated, so ‘our Faculties will be Elevated and Enlarged,
and probably made capable or attaining degrees and kinds of knowledge, to which we
are here but strangers.’ All the more reason, Boyle thought, that we should value the
116
Boyle, Reason and Religion, p. 33.
Boyle, The Excellency of Theology compar’d with Natural Philosophy (London, 1674), pp.
154f.
118
Boyle, Usefulness of Natural Philosophy, WorksII, 14.
117
CHAPTER 5. THE INSTAURATION OF LEARNING
51
Christian religion since it provides the only means by which we can come to enjoy a
perfect knowledge of natural philosophy.119
For Boyle, then, the root cause of the defects of human knowledge seemed not to be the
lapsed condition of humanity per se, but rather a prior set of constraints placed on the
mind and body that were present even in their first creation. He was to speak of ‘a
necessary Imperfection of Humane Nature, that whilst we remain in this mortal
condition, the Soul being confin’d to the dark prison of the Body, is capable … but of a
dim knowledge.’120 For this reason, our knowledge does not extend to the essences of
things, nor even to every object, but only to those ‘as God thought fit to allow our minds
in their present (and perchance lapsed) condition.’121 Although the Fall again receives
mention here, the ‘perchance’ is not suggestive of a strong endorsement of the view that
the Fall is the primary cause of our epistemic limitations. This is not to say the Boyle
entertained any serious doubts about the Fall, but rather that he was uncertain of how it
affected our capacity for knowledge. Most likely he regarded the Fall as evidence of
our tendency to make poor judgments rather than as the ultimate cause of them. As for
the necessity of these limitations, they seem to follow, as implied above, from the kind
of creatures we are—souls imprisoned in bodies. It is our relatively modest position in
the scale of being that limits our capacity for knowledge, particularly when we compare
ourselves to the omniscient God. This comparison means that our knowledge both of
natural and supernatural things will be considerably circumscribed: ‘We purblind
mortals, that are not of the highest order of God’s creatures, may justly think of
ourselves incompetent judges of the extent of the power and knowledge of God …
whose power may justly be supposed to reach farther than our limited intellect can
apprehend.’122 All of this means that we must entertain only modest expectations of the
reach of natural philosophy. Thus Boyle frequently stresses the fact that there is no
‘clearness and certainty’ in physics.123
There has been considerable discussion in the secondary literature about the impact of
Boyle’s theological voluntarism on his approach to natural philosophy. According to a
widely accepted thesis, ‘voluntarists’ (who emphasize the divine will and believe that
God arbitrarily determined the order of the cosmos) tend to be empiricists, while
119
Boyle, Excellency of Theology, pp. 154f. Similar remarks may by found in Seraphic Love,
Works I, 283-90; Usefulness of Natural Philosophy, Works II, 33.
120
Boyle, Excellency of Theology, p. 154.
121
Boyle, Things above Reason, Works IV, 445.
122
Boyle, Appendix to the First Part of The Christian Virtuoso, Works VI, 676f.
CHAPTER 5. THE INSTAURATION OF LEARNING
52
‘intellectualists’ (who stress the divine rationality and goodness, and thus the inherent
rationality of the natural order) tend to be rationalists.124 Boyle is generally taken to be
representative of the former position, Descartes of the latter. There are some
deficiencies in this thesis, but for our present purposes it should be sufficient to point
out that what ultimately drives experimentalism and its relatively modest vision of what
can be achieved in the realm of natural philosophy is not a particular conception of God
and how he makes his decisions, but rather a view of human nature.125 The
experimental approach is justified primarily by appeals to the weakness of our sensory
and cognitive capacities. For many seventeenth-century English thinkers these
weaknesses were understood as consequences of the Fall. Boyle and Locke, for their
part, also place stress on the incapacities that necessarily attend the kind of beings that
we are. But in both cases, the more important issue is the nature of human capacities
rather than the nature of the Deity. And if the idea of a fall away from an originally
perfect knowledge begins to decline in importance towards the end of the seventeenth
century, it nonetheless played a crucial role by drawing attention to the question of the
capacities of human nature in the present world.
Boyle, incidentally, was by no means the only fellow of the Royal Society to harbour
deep misgivings about the prospects of formulating a perfect science. The physician
and botanist Henry Power (c.1626-1668), whose Experimental Philosophy (1664) was
the first to acquaint the general public with the discoveries of microscopy, wrote that
human senses were framed ‘as might best manage this particular engine we call the
Body, and best agree with the place of our habitation (the earth and the elements we
were to converse with) and not to be critical surveyors, and adequate judges of the
immense Universe.’126 John Ray, whose ambivalence about Wilkins’ philosophical
language we have already noted, expressed a similar sentiment in his classic Wisdom of
123
Boyle, Excellency of Theology, p. 153.
See M. B. Foster, “The Christian Doctrine of Creation and the Rise of Modern Natural
Science,” Mind 43 (1934), pp. 446-68; J. E. McGuire, “Boyle’s Conception of Nature,” JHI 33
(1972), pp. 523-42; Francis Oakley, “Christian Theology and the Newtonian Science: The Rise
of the Concept of Laws of Nature,” Church History 30 (1961), pp. 433-5; John Henry, “Henry
More versus Robert Boyle,” in Henry More (1614-87): Tercentenary Essays, ed. Sarah Hutton
(Dordrecht, 1990), pp. 55-76; James E. Force and Richard H. Popkin, Essays on the Context,
Nature, and Influence of Isaac Newton’s Theology (Dordrecht, 1990); P. M. Heimann,
“Voluntarism and Immanence: Conceptions of Nature in Eighteenth Century Thought,” JHI 39
(1978), pp. 271-83; Margaret J. Osler, Divine Will and the Mechanical Philosophy: Gassendi
and Descartes on Contingency and Necessity in the Created World (Cambridge, 1994); Wojcik,
Robert Boyle, pp. 189-211.
125
For difficulties with this thesis see Harrison, ‘Voluntarism and Early Modern Science’, and
‘Was Newton a Voluntarist?’.
126
Power, Experimental Philosophy, Preface, sig. br.
124
CHAPTER 5. THE INSTAURATION OF LEARNING
53
God Manifested in the Works of Creation (1691), declaring that ‘our Eyes and Senses,
however armed or assisted, are too gross to discern the curiosity of the Workmanship of
Nature … and our understanding too dark and infirm to discover and comprehend all
Ends and uses to which the infinitely wise Creator did design them.’127 The most
systematic exposition of this view of the limitations of human knowledge, however, was
provided by John Locke.
The work for which Locke is best known, the Essay concerning Human Understanding
(1690), had its genesis in a casual discussion on the topics of religion and morality that
took place among a group of friends in Locke’s London house early in 1671. By any
ordinary criterion the occasion was not a success. There was certainly no resolution of
the issues under discussion and on parting the participants found themselves in a state of
complete puzzlement. But the meeting did plant the seed of an idea in Locke’s mind
and, on his own account, he came away the insight that ‘before we set about enquiries of
that nature it [is] necessary to examine our own abilities, and see what objects our
understanding were or were not fitted to deal with.’128 This was the idea that was to
give rise to Essay concerning Human Understanding. Locke’s basic insight, it need
hardly be pointed out, was of a piece with the general trend in seventeenth-century
England, to direct attention to the question of human nature before pursuing knowledge
claims. Locke’s doubts about the prospects of a robust knowledge of nature are evident
to the reader as soon as the book is opened. The title page of the fourth and subsequent
editions of the Essay bears this epigraph: ‘As thou knowest not what is the way of the
Spirit, nor how the bones do grow in the womb of her that is with child: even so thou
knowest not the works of God, who maketh all things.’ These words, reputed to be
those of Solomon, are taken from Ecclesiastes 11:5. While they have often escaped the
attention of commentators, they set the tone for the essay and provide an important link
to the tradition of ‘Solomonic’ skepticism.129 In the Epistle to the Reader, Locke
informs the reader that his concern is the analysis of errors and their causes. In order to
provide ‘some service to human understanding’, he states, it will prove necessary to
127
Ray, Wisdom of God, p. 58. Although not published until 1691, this work was composed in
the 1650s.
128
Locke Essay, Epistle to the Reader, I.i.7 (I, 10).
129
The original epigraph comes from Cicero, De natura deorum I.30 and reads, in rough
translation: ‘How much more fitting it would have been, Velleius, for you to have confessed
your ignorance of the things of which you were ignorant, than to have spouted the nonsense you
did, and aroused your own disgust.’ For a discussion of the epigraphs and their significance see
Stephen Buckle, ‘British Sceptical Realism: A Fresh Look at the British Tradition’, European
Journal of Philosophy 7 (1999), 1-29.
CHAPTER 5. THE INSTAURATION OF LEARNING
54
‘break in upon the sanctuary of vanity and ignorance.’130 Errors arise in our
understanding, he goes on to say, because of overgenerous estimates of the capabilities
of the human mind. Accordingly, the Essay was intended as an analysis of the powers
of the mind, ‘how far they reach, to what things they are in any degree proportionate;
and where they fail us….’—all this to the end that ‘we may learn to content ourselves
with what is attainable in this state.’131 The problem of preceding philosophies came
from their failure to acknowledge the limits of reason, and their tendency to ‘require
demonstration, and demand certainty, where probability only is to be had.’132 Thus the
philosophies that had sought certain conclusions based on logical demonstration had
been nothing more than evidence of human hubris. Locke’s obvious debt to Bacon was
acknowledged elsewhere, in the posthumously published Of the Conduct of the
Understanding (1706). Here Locke repeats Bacon’s observations about the
incompetence of logic to address the manifold errors of the mind. ‘There are several
weaknesses and defects in the understanding’, he observes, ‘either from the natural
temper of the mind or ill habits taken up’. Of these defects, he continues, ‘there are as
many possibly to be found, if the mind were thoroughly studied, as there are diseases of
the body, each whereof clogs and disables the understanding to some degree, and
therefore deserves to be looked after and cured.’133
For a figure typically regarded as a standard bearer for the Enlightenment and the
philosopher (along with Bacon) most closely associated with the rise of empirical
science, Locke’s vision of the reach of natural philosophy is a rather sober one. Armed
with Baconian ‘experiments’ and ‘histories’, Locke thought, the industrious investigator
can penetrate further into the natures of things than the scholastic philosophers had ever
managed. But this experimental knowledge falls well short of the status of science:
I deny not, but a man, accustomed to rational and regular experiments, shall be
able to see farther into the nature of bodies, and guess righter at their yet
unknown properties, than one that is a stranger to them: But yet, as I have said,
this is but judgment and opinion, not knowledge and certainty. This way of
getting and improving our knowledge in substances only by experience and
130
Locke, Essay, Epistle to the Reader (I, 14). Locke acknowledges his debt to Bacon in Of the
Conduct of the Understanding, 5th edn. ed. Thomas Fowler (Oxford, 1901), p. 4.
131
Ibid., Introduction, 4 (I, 28f.)
132
Ibid., Introduction, 5, (I, 30).
133
Locke, Conduct of the Understanding, p. 4; Cf. p 35. On the disease metaphor in Locke’s
Conduct see Nicholas Wolterstorff, John Locke and the Ethics of Belief (Cambridge, 1996), pp.
94f. For Locke’s often unrecognised indebtedness to Bacon see Peter Anstey, ‘Locke, Bacon
and natural history’ Early Science and Medicine 7 (2002), 65-92; Neale Wood, ‘The Baconian
Character of Locke’s “Essay”’, Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 6 (1975), 43-84.
CHAPTER 5. THE INSTAURATION OF LEARNING
55
history, which is all that the weakness of our faculties in this state of
mediocrity, which we are in this world, can attain to; makes me suspect, that
natural philosophy is not capable of being made a science.134
This verdict is repeated in Locke’s Thoughts concerning Education (1693) in which he
observes that we shall never be able to make a science out of natural philosophy because
the ‘Works of Nature are contrived by a Wisdom, and operate by ways too far
surpassing our Faculties to discover, or Capacities to conceive, for us ever to be able to
reduce them into a Science.’135 Because the workmanship of God far surpasses the
comprehension of the most ingenious of men, philosophical taxonomies of the kind
proposed by Wilkins are sheer fantasies. Locke wrote that it is in vain that we ‘pretend
to range things into sorts, and dispose them into certain classes, under names, by their
real essences.’ ‘A blind man’, he concluded, ‘may as soon sort things by their
colours.’136
For Locke, as for Boyle, however, our current ‘state of mediocrity’ seems to be less the
result of a catastrophic Fall than of the fact that our proper station is quite literally a
‘mediocre’ or middle state between angelic perfection and the lowers orders of the
beasts.137 The capacities we do have, however, are well suited to our current state.
According to Locke, God had ‘fitted our senses, faculties, and organs, to the
conveniences of life, and the business we have to do here’—that business not being the
quest for a complete knowledge of the operations of nature, but that of learning about
God through the creatures, discovering the nature of our moral duties, and providing for
the practical necessities of life.138 In this respect we are no different from Adam. In
contrast to Glanvill, and in keeping with Boyle’s view, Locke had little time for an
Adam equipped with supersensitive organs of perception, for these he regarded as
incompatible with the nature of human beings. While conceding that our present senses
were indeed ‘dull and weak’, he pointed out that any significant improvement in their
acuity would be accompanied by a host of inconveniences. Were our hearing more
134
Locke, Essay, IV.xii.10, (I, 349). Cf.: ‘But as to a perfect science of natural bodies (not to
mention spiritual beings) we are, I think, so far from being capable of any such thing, that I
conclude it lost labour to seek after it.’ Essay, IV.iii.29 (I, 222). See also Essay, III.vi.9 (I, 64).
In this context Locke means ‘science’ in the Aristotelian sense of knowledge that is certain and
demonstrable. For Locke’s views on the nature of natural philosophy see Peter Anstey, ‘Locke
on method in natural philosophy’, in The Philosophy of John Locke: New Perspectives, ed. Peter
Anstey, (London, 2003), pp. 26-42.
135
Locke, Some Thoughts Concerning Education § 190, ed. John Yolton and Jean Yolton
(Oxford, 1989), p. 244.
136
Locke, Essay, III.vi.9 (II, 64).
137
For Locke’s thoughts on the chain of being see the Essay, III.6.12 (II, 68).
138
Locke, Essay, II.xxiii.12 (I, 402)
CHAPTER 5. THE INSTAURATION OF LEARNING
56
sensitive, we would be distracted by a perpetual noise, and would ‘in the quietest
retirement be less able to sleep or meditate, than in the middle of a sea fight.’
Microscopic or telescopic vision would also prove to be more a burden than a boon.
One possessed of an extraordinary ‘quickness and tenderness of sight’ could not, Locke
supposed, ‘endure bright sun-shine, or so much as open day-light; nor take in but a very
small part of any object at once.’139 As for Adam’s supposed ability to name things
according to their natures, this is also treated with scepticism. Adam was merely the
first to impose names on things, but his naming would be no different to ours were we
in his situation. Indeed, we still possess the same naming capacities as Adam: ‘The
same liberty also that Adam had of affixing any new name to any idea, the same has any
one still.’140
The ideal conditions for acquiring knowledge to which our present state was to be
compared, then, were not represented by Adam in Paradise, but by the situation of
angelic beings—‘spirits’ that might have the ability ‘to frame and shape to themselves
organs of sensation or perception, as to suit them to their present design, and the
circumstances they would consider’.141 It is a measure of Locke’s commitment to
empiricism that in his scheme of things even spiritual beings would rely on sense
perceptions for their knowledge of material bodies. Elsewhere, he was to affirm that
spirits, ‘of a higher rank than those immersed in flesh’, have knowledge and ideas
‘much more perfect than ours’, and indeed ‘may have as clear ideas of the radical
constitution of substances, as we have of a triangle, and so perceive how all their
properties and operations flow from thence: But the manner how they come by that
knowledge exceeds our conceptions’.142 It follows from Locke’s adherence to the idea
that God placed humans on a specific rung on the ladder of being that had Adam
possessed the remarkable intellectual abilities so often attributed to him, he would in
fact not have been human at all, but a creature occupying a more elevated rank in the
scala naturae.
Nonetheless, it seems clear that Locke’s assessment of human nature was shaped to a
considerable degree by the Augustinian tradition. This influence is particularly
conspicuous in the Two Tracts upon Government, written between the years of 1660 and
1662 in the wake of the failure of the puritan experiment. For Locke, while the events
139
140
141
142
Ibid. Cf. Power, Experimental Philosophy, preface.
Ibid., III.vi.51 (II, 470).
Ibid., II.xxiii.13 (I, 404).
Ibid., III.xi.23 (II, 160).
CHAPTER 5. THE INSTAURATION OF LEARNING
57
of the immediate past had shown the folly of puritan political aspirations, they had
paradoxically confirmed one of that movement’s most fundamental convictions,
namely, the deep corruption of human nature. The puritan project, however laudable in
its original conception, had served to demonstrate how the best motives are inevitably
diverted towards evil. Instead of establishing a godly commonwealth, they had
succeeded only in reducing England to ‘chaos’ and ‘a heady ferment of passions’.
Their proud ambition was the consequence of neither reason nor knowledge of the
divine will, but was instead a demonstration of ‘predatory lust under the guise of
Christian liberty and religion.’143 Locke thus welcomed the restoration of the
monarchy. Without legitimately instituted political power, Locke urged, there would be
‘no peace, no security, no enjoyments, enmity with all men and safe possession of
nothing, and those stinging swarms of miseries that attend anarchy and rebellion.’144
The Hobbesian cadences of this statement are unmistakeable, as a number of
commentators have pointed out.145 It is not unreasonable to think that the common
currency of fallen human nature informed the views of both Locke and Hobbes. Locke
himself provides support for this reading. ‘Ever since man threw himself into the
pollution of sin’, he wrote, ‘he sullies whatever he takes into his hand, and he that at
first could make the best and perfectest nature degenerate cannot fail now to make other
things so’. Political anarchy is one result of our ‘frail nature’ and ‘corruption’.146
This early conviction persisted well beyond the aftermath of the civil wars. If anything,
it was reinforced during Locke’s three-year sojourn in France in the years 1675-9. Here
he encountered the writings of the Jansenist theologian Pierre Nicole. Locke was
particularly taken with Nicole’s Essais de Morale (1671-78), and set himself the task of
translating three of them into English. In a journal entry dated 15 August 1676,
probably intended as a preface to his translations, he observed:
…when we a little consider what our author says and experience vouches
concerning the shortness of our lives and the weakness of our understandings,
143
Locke Two Tracts, in Political Essays, ed. Mark Goldie (Cambridge, 1997), p. 56.
Ibid., p. 37
145
See, e.g., J. Gough, John Locke’s Political Philosophy, (Oxford, 1950), p. 180; M. Cranston,
Locke: A Biography (London, 1957), p. 62. See also Goldie, Locke, Political Essays, p. 37, n.
19.
146
Locke, Two Tracts, in Political Essays, p. 36. Thus John Dunn on the Two Tracts: ‘The
cognitive insouciance and the insubordinate disposition of fallen men necessitate an elaborate
structure of human authorities’. Political Thought of John Locke, p. 15. John Spellman agrees
that Locke’s Two Tracts were premised on ‘the irreversible corruption and inherent sinfulness of
all men’. Locke and the Problem of Depravity, pp. 49-62. Cf. Marshall, John Locke, pp. 27, 32,
63; John Colman, John Locke’s Moral Philosophy, (Edinburgh, 1983), p. 12; Ian Harris, ‘The
Politics of Christianity’, in Rogers (ed.), John Locke, pp. 197-216 (p. 207).
144
CHAPTER 5. THE INSTAURATION OF LEARNING
58
what small progress men of the quickest parts make in real knowledge, and how
little of useful truth we discover after a long search and infinite labour, we shall
find there was reason enough to desire all needless difficulties should be
removed out of the way.147
It is likely, John Marshall writes, that Locke ‘broadly agreed with Nicole’s vision of
men’s corrupted nature, the centrality of corrupt self-love among the passions, and the
essential role of God’s grace in enlivening and saving men.’148 Indeed the affinity
between Locke’s philosophy and Jansenism was noted at the time by Voltaire who on
one occasion described Locke as ‘the Pascal of the English’.149
Perhaps the chief significance of Locke’s encounter with Nicole was that it provided
independent corroboration, as it were, of what in England was the dominant view.
Nicole’s position, as restated by Locke, was entirely consistent with the theological
consensus in England at the time, where all groups, including the relatively optimistic
Latitudinarians, stressed the depravity of the human condition.150 There is little in the
later political writings to suggest that Locke ever abandoned these convictions. While
his unpublished ‘Essay on Toleration’ (1667) represents a change of heart on the
question of toleration (possibly the result of his experience in Europe of Catholics,
Lutherans and Calvinists living together in relative peace), he was still to identify
‘depraved ambitious human nature’ as the reason for men’s desire to have dominion
over other men.151 In the Two Treatises on Government (1690), Locke writes that
‘Adam was created a perfect man, his body and mind in full possession of their strength
and reason’. In the state of innocence he had been able to ‘govern his actions according
to the dictates of the law of reason which God had implanted in him.’ For this reason
the original grant of government was not given to Adam until after the Fall, when he
was ‘much distant in condition’ from his first creation. In theory, the prescriptions of
the law of nature would have been sufficient to ensure a ‘great and general community’
were it not for the ‘corruption, and viciousness of degenerate Men.’152 By implication,
civil government was a prerequisite for peace in the post-lapsarian world.153 Locke’s
rambling and repetitive Third Letter concerning Toleration (1692) is peppered with
147
Locke, Essays, pp. 254-7, qu. in Marsall, John Locke, p. 134.
Marshall, John Locke, pp. 134. Cf. Kim Parker, The Biblical Politics of John Locke,
(Waterloo, 2004), pp. 53f.
149
Voltaire, Eloge et Pensées de Pascal, in Louis Moland (ed.), Oeuvres completes de Voltaire,
52 vols., (Paris, 1877-85), XXXI, 42.
150
Spellman, The Latitudinarians, p. 55; Marshall, John Locke, p. 135.
151
Marshall, John Locke, p. 64.
152
Locke, Two Treatises of Government, 12th edn., II.vi.56 (Laslett edn., p. 305); I.iii.16 (p.
152); II.ix.128 (p. 352).
148
CHAPTER 5. THE INSTAURATION OF LEARNING
59
references to ‘depraved’ and ‘corrupt human nature’.154 Even in the Essay, according to
John Dunn, Locke only claims that human beings are potentially or intermittently
rational, given that all human judgements ‘are clouded by the corrupt passions released
by the Fall.’155
Locke had two further occasions to reflect on the biblical narrative of the Fall and its
contemporary significance. His famous refutation of Robert Filmer’s Patriarcha
entailed a careful exegesis of the narrative of Adam’s creation and Fall. As we have
already seen, Filmer’s case for absolutism was grounded in the idea that Adam was the
first monarch; that his authority came from a divine grant rather than the consent of
those he governed; that this power was conveyed to the patriarchs and from them to all
monarchs; and that there had never in all of history been a ‘state of nature’ in which
individuals had been free. All of this was buttressed with supporting references from
scripture.156 Locke’s demolition of this argument in his Two Treatises involved an
alternative reading of Genesis and one which, arguably, was more faithful to the literal
account than Filmer’s. Locke upbraided Filmer for having read his personal political
views into the text, declaring that ‘our own ill grounded opinions, however by us called
“probable,” cannot authorize us to understand scripture contrary to the direct and plain
meaning of the words.’157 A consideration of that ‘plain meaning’ of the relevant texts
led Locke to the conclusion that ‘Adam had not, either by natural right of fatherhood, or
by positive donation from God, any such authority over his children, or dominion over
the world, as is pretended’.158 The other puzzling feature of Filmer’s account seized
upon by Locke concerned the issue of succession. Even if God had granted absolute
political power to Adam, Locke pointed out, it was not clear how this power would pass
to his offspring.159 On this issue, Filmer had simply invoked the commonplace principle
of Adam as a representative person—‘what was given to Adam, was given in his person
to his posterity.’160 This view was common currency, as we have seen, because it was
presupposed in one of the standard explanations of how Adamic guilt came to fall upon
succeeding generations. It was by virtue of this principle, then, that both Adam’s
monarchical authority and his guilt could be transmitted to his posterity (although the
153
Cf. Marshall, John Locke, p. 145, n. 38.
See, e.g., Locke, A Third Letter for Toleration, in Works VI, 351f., 362, 400, 446, 467, 543.
155
Dunn, Political Thought of John Locke, p. 194.
156
Filmer, Patriarcha, p. 13 and passim.
157
Locke, Two Treatises I.iv.36 (p. 165).
158
Ibid., II.i.1 (p. 267). Cf. pp.161, 291.
159
Ibid., I.ix.95-8 (pp. 211-13).
160
Robert Filmer, The Anarchy of a Limited of Mixed Monarchy, in J. P. Sommerville (ed.),
Filmer: Patriarch and other Writings (Cambridge, 1991), p. 138.
154
CHAPTER 5. THE INSTAURATION OF LEARNING
60
former, problematically, was conveyed patrilineally to particular persons).161 Locke
was to deny that Adam possessed such a representative capacity, and did so again in the
rather different context of his account of Christianity.
In the first sentence of The Reasonableness of Christianity as Delivered in the
Scriptures (1695) Locke announced: ‘It is obvious to any one, who reads the New
Testament, that the doctrine of redemption, and consequently of the Gospel, is founded
upon the supposition of Adam's fall.’ For Locke, arriving at a proper understanding of
the nature of Adam’s fall was as fundamental for a right conception of Christianity as it
was for political philosophy. What quickly emerges in this work, however, is that while
Locke still holds to the idea of the Fall, he has abandoned the Augustinian/ Calvinist
understanding of it. This was as a consequence of applying the two criteria cited in his
title—reasonableness and the witness of scripture—to the question of what Adam had
lost on his expulsion from paradise. Locke argues, plausibly enough, that on a strictly
literal reading of Genesis and St Paul, Adam had lost only ‘immortality and bliss’ as a
consequence of sin. It was these things, then, that were restored by Christ’s redemptive
work.162 Mortality and the loss of bliss might have indirectly made the acquisition of
knowledge more difficult, but Locke did not seem to think that the Fall had directly
wrought havoc with the mind or the senses. Neither did Locke find any conclusive
biblical evidence to support the Augustinian view that moral guilt is inherited by all of
the descendents of Adam, ‘whom millions had never heard of, and no one had
authorized to transact for him, or to be his Representative.’ According to the New
Testament, Locke concludes, ‘every one’s sin is charged upon himself only.’163 Such a
view, happily, also accords with commonsense conceptions of justice and of the
goodness of God himself.164 It is also very similar to a position briefly sketched out
161
Harris, ‘The Politics of Christianity’; Parker, Biblical Politics of John Locke, p. 149;
Spellman, John Locke, pp. 74f.
162
Locke, Reasonableness of Christianity, Works, VII, 10. Also see the MS. ‘Homo ante et
post lapsum’, reproduced in Victor Nuovo (ed.), John Locke: Writings on Religion (Oxford,
2002), p. 231. This is very close to Thomas Hobbes’s reading, Leviathan, III.38.2/25 (p. 479).
Locke returned to this issue in his Paraphrase and Notes on the Epistles of St Paul (1705-7).
See Parker, Biblical Politics of John Locke, pp. 63-5.
163
Ibid. pp. 7, 10. Locke’s contemporary, Bishop Gilbert Burnet, had made a similar point
about the Augustinian view which he equated with Federal theology: ‘And since the Foundation
of this is a supposed Covenant with Adam as the Representative Head of Mankind, it is strange
that a thing of that great consequence, should not have been more plainly Reported in the
History of the Creation.’ Burnet, An Exposition, p. 115.
164
For Locke’s sensitivity to this issue see ‘Peccatum originale’, (1661), in Nuovo (ed.),
Writings on Religion, pp. 229f.; Locke, Journal, 1 August 1680, in Goldie (ed.), Locke: Political
Essays, p. 277. The notion of Adam as a public person was also inconsistent with Locke’s
conception of personal identity. See Ian Harris, The Mind of John Locke, a Study of Political
Theory in its Intellectual Setting (Cambridge, 1994), pp. 301f.
CHAPTER 5. THE INSTAURATION OF LEARNING
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earlier by Locke in his commonplace book, in which the Fall is said to have introduced
private possessions and labour, disparities in living conditions, along with
‘coviteousness, pride & ambition which by fashen & example spread the corruption
which has soe prevailed over man kind.’165 This follows from the Genesis text in which
the necessity of labour is attributed to the Fall (Gen. 3:17-19). In Locke’s well-known
doctrine, property only becomes private when mixed with human labour. Thus with
private possessions, themselves necessitated by the Fall, came social inequalities and a
host of consequent evils. Adam’s lapse did introduce corruption into the world, but it
was mostly engendered by social rather than inherited factors. Much of this was also
consistent with the views of Locke’s Arminian friend and leader of the Dutch
Remonstrants, Philip van Limborch (1633-1712), whom he had met during his
voluntary exile in the Netherlands during the mid-1680s.166 Van Limborch pointed out
in his Theologia Christiana (1686) that the expression ‘original sin’ was not to be found
in scripture, and while he conceded that ‘we are now born less pure than Adam was
created’, he described that loss of purity as ‘only a natural Inclination of attaining that
which is grateful to the Flesh, which is properly owning the Constitution of the Body,
which we derive from our next immediate parents.’167 This was inherited corruption in
only a weak sense, and wholly in accordance with Locke’s view, expressed in the Essay,
that our cognitive limitations are owing to our status as embodied creatures and the
corrupting influences of our upbringing.
Brief comment should be made at this juncture on Locke’s Some Thoughts concerning
Education (1693), a work that in his day rivalled the Essay in popularity. This book is
directly relevant to the present discussion because it sets out some of the practical
implications of what is the best-known contention of the Essay: that at birth the human
mind is a blank sheet or tabula rasa.168 If there are, in fact, no innate principles or ideas
in the mind, it follows that it is education or training that play the most significant role
in determining the nature of the person. Locke’s faith in the efficacy of education and
his apparent assertion of the essential innocence of the neonate have sometimes been
165
Locke, ‘Homo ante et post lapsum’ (1662), in Nuovo (ed.), Writings on Religion, p. 231
(my emphasis). See also Dunn, Political Thought of John Locke, p. 115; Jacob Viner,
‘“Possessive Individualism” as Original Sin’, Canadian Journal of Economics and Political
Science 29 (1963), 548-59.
166
On the Locke-Limborch connection see Spellman, Locke and the Problem of Depravity, pp.
130-7; Israel, Radical Enlightenment, pp. 464-71.
167
From the English translation of Theologia Christiana, Philip van Limborch, A Complete
System, or Body of Divinity … founded on Scripture and Reason, 2 vols., tr. William Jones
(London, 1713), I, 190, qu. in Spellman, Locke and the Problem of Depravity, p. 132.
168
‘Let us then suppose the mind to be, as we say, white paper, void of all characters, without
CHAPTER 5. THE INSTAURATION OF LEARNING
62
interpreted as an uncompromising repudiation of the pessimistic Augustinian tradition
and a major catalyst for the liberation of humanity from the bleak vision of human
nature fostered by early modern Protestants. However, to claim that at birth the mind is
a tabula rasa is not necessarily to claim that it is innocent or free from bias towards
good or evil. Whatever his successors might have made of the doctrine, Locke himself
still believed that human beings are constitutionally selfish and wilful.169 We should
also recall that Locke was by no means the first to advance the idea of the mind as a
blank slate, and that it had long been regarded as quite compatible with the view of
innate corruption. Prominent advocates of original sin were thus happy to affirm the
view that the mind was a ‘blank sheet’ at birth. These included Thomas Aquinas, who
had cited Aristotle to the effect that the mind is at first ‘like a clean tablet on which
nothing is written’. A number of Locke’s contemporaries also saw nothing in this
principle that counted against even stronger versions of original sin than Aquinas had
been prepared to countenance.170 It is also possible to conceive of the educational
programme set out in Thoughts concerning Education as the development of a longstanding puritan emphasis on the value of education as remitting some of the worst
effects of the Fall. Huguenot émigré Jean Gailhard exemplifies both of those points.
Although a staunch opponent of Locke on a number of issues, he was to agree that the
child is ‘a smooth table upon which any thing can be written’. But this was simply one
of the premises establishing the importance of education. The other was original sin,
thus: ‘Learning doth also afford us help, and rules, how to master our passions…. Now
these passions are seated in the heart, wherein reason ought to preside… but this part of
man is much sensible of the sad effects of Adam’s sin.’171 Education could be regarded,
on analogy with the coercive powers of the state and the discipline of the Baconian
experimental regimen, as a therapy aimed at remedying the anarchic tendencies of
wayward passions. There is clear evidence that this was how Locke’s general position
was interpreted into the eighteenth century. If Locke’s epistemology could be
appropriated by the forces of Enlightenment it could equally serve to reinforce the more
sober assessments of human capacity that originally inspired it. In Isaac Watts’ Logick
any ideas.’ Locke, Essay, II.i.2 (I, 121).
169
Locke, Thoughts concerning Education, 35, 132, 167 (pp. 104, 193, 223).
170
Aquinas, ST 1a. 79, 2. On the history of the idea see Neil Wood, ‘Tabula Rasa, Social
Environmentalism, and the “English Paradigm”’, JHI 53 (1992), 647-68; Spellman, John Locke,
pp. 84f.
171
Gailhard, Compleat Gentleman, 28. Cf. Milton, ‘Of Education’, in Prose Works of John
Milton, ed. J. A. St John and Charles Sumner (London: Bohn, 1848-64). III, 462f. See also
Webster, Great Instauration, pp. 100f. On earlier puritan attitudes to education see John
Morgan, Godly Learning: Puritan Attitudes towards Reason, Learning, and Education, 15601640 (Cambridge, 1988).
CHAPTER 5. THE INSTAURATION OF LEARNING
63
(1725)—a standard logic text based on Lockian principles which appeared in more than
twenty editions over the course of the eighteenth century—the author announces that the
science of logic is designed ‘to rescue our Reasoning Powers from their unhappy
Slavery and Darkness.’ This new form of logic, inspired by Locke and distinguished
from the noisy and wordy wrangling of the Schools, was intended to guard us against
‘the foolish and evil Dispositions that are found in fallen Man’ and ‘to raise us in some
measure from the Ruins of our Fall.’172
All of this seems to confirm W. M. Spellman’s considered verdict that one of the central
aims of Locke’s philosophical career was ‘to fully illuminate the nature of Fall.’173 It is
true that to a degree Locke’s lifelong engagement with the Fall narrative was a function
of the intellectual milieu of Restoration England in which so many issues were framed
within the limits of a broadly shared theological conception of human nature. It would
have been difficult to make a significant contribution to contemporary debates—such as
those concerning the philosophical justification for particular forms of government—
without coming to terms with this formative myth. But Locke was also committed to
the idea of a Fall on his own account. His reading of scripture, his vision of Christianity
(minimalist though it might have become), and not least his own experiences, led to an
acceptance of the doctrine. There is also the intriguing possibility that he initially
formulated his opposition to innatism under the influence of the prevailing
understandings of original sin according to which the Fall had obliterated whatever
moral notices had originally been stamped on the human soul by God.174 Undeniably,
Locke’s final position on the Fall represents something of a watershed. With Locke,
two of the fundamental characteristics of Calvinist and Lutheran versions of
Christianity—the principle of sola scriptura and a strong commitment to the doctrine of
original sin—become disengaged . The plain sense of scripture, Locke discovered, did
not seem to support Augustine’s bleak doctrine of inherited guilt. Neither, incidentally,
did it seem to support the idea of Adam as a peerless natural philosopher. Locke’s
Adam is a figure whose prelapsarian capacities are not much different from ours, and
thus in many respects our natural condition is similar to that of Adam in his
innocence—with regard to our naming of things, in relation to the formation of our
172
Isaac Watts, Logick: Or, the Right Use of Reason in the Enquiry after Truth, with a Variety
of Rules to guard against Error (London, 1725), pp. iii, vi, 4f.
173
Spellman, Locke and the Problem of Depravity, p. 103. For an alternative reading of Locke
see Peter Schouls, Reasoned Freedom: John Locke and Enlightenment (Ithaca, 1992), pp. 193203.
174
Thus Marshall: ‘Locke would seem to have originally believed in … a moderate view of the
Fall, one that obliterated many but not all innate principles.’ John Locke, p. 32. Also see Locke,
CHAPTER 5. THE INSTAURATION OF LEARNING
64
political institutions, inasmuch as we bear the burden of guilt for our own
transgressions, and in the means by which we must acquire our knowledge. Where we
do differ from Adam, however, is in the social matrix into which we are born. The
corrupting influences of our human environment place us at a considerable
disadvantage, and these influences are themselves the consequence of sin. When Bacon
and Hooke had spoken of the deficiencies of human nature, they had distributed blame
across innate infirmities and social conditioning.175 Locke shifted the balance in favour
of social factors. We are still inherently limited beings, but this by virtue of our rank in
the cosmic hierarchy rather than original sin. We are born into conditions that further
compromise our already weak abilities, and these can be regarded as a consequence of
the corrupt natures of those who are around us from birth. That said, Locke’s estimate of
the reach of the human mind is not so different from those who attributed human
weaknesses to an inherited disposition. Viewed in this light, the Essay concerning
Human Understanding was not an epistemological manifesto for a progressive and
triumphalist modern science, nor was it (for its author at least) the philosophical
harbinger of an Enlightenment that would place its unqualified trust in the powers of
reason. Rather it was an attempt to establish the narrow limits of our knowledge of the
world, and point the way to a more certain science— the science of morals. Human
beings, Locke insisted, can never possess ‘a universal or perfect comprehension of
whatsoever is’, yet they ‘have light enough to lead them to knowledge of their Maker,
and the sight of their own duties.’176 Knowledge relating to ‘our conduct’ and ‘our
eternal estate’ constituted ‘the proper science’ and the ‘greatest interest’ of the human
race.177 Locke’s late views on toleration and government are indeed in tune with the
broad spirit of the Enlightenment and no doubt had a significant role in those
movements. But these views, like his epistemology, were grounded in a sober
assessment of human nature that was entirely consistent with the anthropology of the
Protestant reformers. As Victor Nuovo has recently put it, perhaps we should now think
of Locke ‘not merely as a progenitor of the Enlightenment, but as one of the last of the
Reformers.’178
Essays on the Law of Nature, ed. W. von Leyden, (Oxford, 1954), p 137.
175
Bacon, Novum Organum §§38-68, Works IV, 53-69; Hooke, Micrographia, Preface.
176
Locke, Essay, Introduction, 5 (I, 29); Cf. Locke, Essay, II.xxiii.13 (I, 404).
177
Ibid., Introduction, 6 (I, 31); IV.xii.11 (II, 350). For a similar reading of Locke see
Spellman, Locke and the Problem of Depravity, pp. 5-7, 104-6, and passim. Cf. Richard
Ashcroft, ‘Locke wrote the Essay … in order to secure the ends of religion and morality.’ ‘Faith
and Knowledge in Locke’s Philosophy’, in John Locke: Problems and Perspectives, ed. John
Yolton (Cambridge, 1969), p. 198.
178
Nuovo (ed.), Writings on Religion (Oxford, 2002), p. lvii. Cf. Spellman, John Locke, pp. 47;
CHAPTER 5. THE INSTAURATION OF LEARNING
65
V ANTHROPOLOGY ABANDONED
Locke met Isaac Newton in the spring of 1689. He had read the Principia during his
exile in France and while, like most readers, he found its mathematics impenetrable, this
had not prevented him from writing a favourable review of the work. In spite of
Newton’s notoriously difficult personality the two became close friends and they
exchanged ideas on a number of topics of common interest. Much of their
correspondence concerns the interpretation of Scripture and the slender biblical
foundations of the doctrine of the Trinity, but for their immediate posterity their names
were linked as dual founders of a new form of knowledge.179 According to one
dominant eighteenth-century French reading of history, and one still remarkably
influential, Newton and Locke, with some help from Bacon and Descartes, were
inaugurators of the modern, enlightened age. Jean d’Alembert thus suggested that if
Locke had created a scientific philosophy suited to the modern era, Newton was the
originator of a scientific physics. Both were said to have shared an unwavering
commitment to the empirical approach to knowledge.180 D’Alembert and, before him,
Voltaire, had allowed that Descartes been both iconoclast and innovator. But their
countryman’s speculative methods were judged to have been seriously deficient when
compared with a more rigorous English experimentalism, the chief representatives of
which were Bacon, Locke, and Newton. As we have already seen, Locke’s posthumous
enlistment in the cause of Enlightenment is not without its difficulties, and there are
other problems with the version of history promoted by the philosophes.181 My concern
in this final section will be to consider one aspect of this history—the assumption
present not only in the propaganda of the French Enlightenment but also in more recent
histories of science, according to which Newton may be regarded as the culmination of
the tradition of English experimental philosophy that began with Bacon. If this were
the case, we would expect to find in Newton’s works discussions of the effects of the
Fall, or at the very least some systematic account of the limits of knowledge and the
way in which experimental philosophy compensates for these. As it turns out, such
179
Peter Walmsley, Locke’s Essay and the Rhetoric of Science (Lewisburg, PA, 2003), p. 20; J.
R. Milton, ‘Locke’s Life and Times’, in Vere Chappell (ed.), Cambridge Companion to Locke,
(Cambridge, 1994), pp. 5-25.
180
Jean Le Rond d’Alembert, ‘Discors préliminaire’, Encyclopédie, ou Dictionnaire Raisonné
des Sciences, des Arts et des Métiers vol. I, (Paris, 1751), pp. xxliv-v. Cf. ‘Expérimental’, vol. 6
(Paris, 1756), 298-301; Voltaire, Letters Concerning the English Nation, letters 13-16. See also
P. M. Rattansi, ‘Voltaire and the Enlightenment Image of Newton’, in H. Lloyd-Jones (ed.),
History and Imagination (London, 1981), 218-31.
181
Israel, Radical Enlightenment, pp. 522-6; Brian Young, ‘Newtonianism and the Enthusiasm
CHAPTER 5. THE INSTAURATION OF LEARNING
66
anthropological concerns are almost completely absent from the Newtonian corpus. In
spite of extensive and well-documented interests in the sphere of theology Newton
showed little interest in the Fall of Adam or the doctrine of original sin. Neither does he
anywhere discuss at any length the issue of the limitations of human knowledge. On
the face of it, this is inconvenient for the central thesis of this book, according to which
advocacy of a certain kind of experimentalism is closely linked to such considerations.
The question that needs further (if necessarily brief) consideration, is whether Newton’s
methodological prescriptions differ significantly from the pattern of Baconian ‘natural
and experimental histories’, and if so, whether these differences can be related in any
way to his silence on the questions of theological anthropology that had so preoccupied
his predecessors.
Newton’s extra-curricular preoccupations—chronology, alchemy, Church history,
biblical prophecy and theology—have been the subject of much scholarly discussion
over the past few decades. It has long been known that Newton was passionately
opposed to the central tenet of Christian orthodoxy, the doctrine of the Trinity. From
his voluminous manuscript writings—Newton wrote several million words on religious
topics—we now know that he also cherished other heterodox views, rejecting infant
baptism, the natural immortality of the soul, and the existence of the devil.182 The
abandonment of these beliefs was not, as it was for some deistically inclined
contemporaries, the consequence of rationalism or religious scepticism. Newton
remained fervently committed to what he believed was genuine Christianity, understood
as the simple biblical faith practiced by the early Church. According to Newton’s
carefully reconstructed history of the Church, the minimalist creed of the first Christians
had been corrupted by the introduction of doctrines that reflected Greek philosophy
rather biblical truths. Chief amongst these was the idea of a triune God which,
according to Newton’s somewhat idiosyncratic version of Church history, had been
inserted into the Christian creeds at the instigation of the Church Father Athanasius
(c.296—373).183
On the subject of original sin Newton had little to say even in his private papers. This is
of Enlightenment’, Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 35 (2004), 645-63.
182
Frank Manuel, The Religion of Isaac Newton (Oxford, 1974); James Force and Richard
Popkin (eds.), Essays on the Context, Nature, and Influence of Isaac Newton’s Theology
(Dordrecht, 1990); Stephen Snobelen, ‘Isaac Newton, Heretic: The Strategies of a Nicodemite’,
BJHS 32 (1999), 381-419; ‘Lust, Pride, and Amibition: Isaac Newton and the Devil’, in Force
and Hutton (eds.), Newton and Newtonianism, pp. 155-182.
183
Yahuda MS 15, Bodmer MS ‘On the Church’
CHAPTER 5. THE INSTAURATION OF LEARNING
67
one of the striking features of Newton’s theological writings when compared with those
of his contemporaries. In none of the manuscript sources listing what Newton
considered to be the basic tenets of Christian belief is a significant place accorded to the
Fall or original sin.184 In his ‘Theological Notebook’ brief reference is made to the
classic verse in Romans 5 which speaks of sin entering the world through the
transgressions of one man. Newton simply observes in this context that the curse from
which we are redeemed is the curse of the Law, rather than the curse of original sin.185
While Newton’s silence on this issue may seem surprising when we consider the
prominent place of theological anthropology in wide range of contemporary writings, it
is nonetheless consistent with his personal religion with its creedal minimalism and
strict Biblicism.
It is likely that Newton considered the doctrine of original sin to be a
late interpolation into Christian theology and one that, like the notion of a Triune God,
rested on rather flimsy biblical foundations. A denial of original sin would also cohere
with Newton’s rejection of infant baptism (understood within the Catholic tradition as a
washing away of original sin), his scepticism about Satan (a central figure in the Fall
narrative), and his occasional expression of Pelagian views.186
But there is a more
obvious connection between Newton’s rejection of the deity of Christ and his silence on
original sin. As Locke rightly declared in The Reasonableness of Christianity, the idea
of the Fall was the foundation upon which the whole edifice of the doctrine of Christ’s
redemption was constructed. And as Athanasius himself had long ago pointed out, there
was a vital connection between the nature of Christ and the atoning work that he had to
perform. Such was extent of our fallen condition that only God himself could repair it.
Necessarily, the redeemer must participate in the Godhead.187 In orthodox theology,
then, the doctrines of original sin and of the divinity of Christ were inextricably linked.
Newton’s vehement rejection of the Trinity was thus entirely consistent with his telling
silence on the issue of original sin.
184
‘Seven Statements on Religion’, Keynes MS 6; ‘A Short Scheme of the True Religion’,
Keynes MS 7; ‘Twelve Articles on Religion’, Keynes MS 8; ‘Three Paragraphs on Religion’,
Keynes MS 9.
185
Keynes MS 2, part 1, xxii Christi Satisfactio, & Redemptio vivi. There is a heading ‘xxix
Status Naturæ et Gratiæ’, but unhelpfully nothing is written there. Insofar as he has any
conception equivalent to that of original sin, it would be understood as something like the
universal human propensity towards idolatry. Westfall, Never at Rest, p. 355; Rob Iliffe, ‘”The
Idols of the Temple”: Isaac Newton and the Private Life of Anti-Idolatry’, PhD Diss. University
of Cambridge, 1989.
186
Part 2 of the ‘Theological Notebook’ opens with a statement to the effect that a man sins not
through necessity, but through choice. Keynes MS 2, part 2.
187
Athanasius, De Incarnatione §6, §10.
CHAPTER 5. THE INSTAURATION OF LEARNING
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On the thesis being pursued in this volume it would expected that Newton’s agnosticism
with regard to theological anthropology, unusual for his period, would have had a
bearing on the way in which he formulated his ideas about scientific method.
Specifically, he ought to have been less concerned with justifying his methods by
appealing to particular theories of human nature and more open to the prospect of a
knowledge of nature that was certain and complete. As it turns out, Newton’s approach
to natural philosophy was quite idiosyncratic. Considered in the context of the
seventeenth century, Newton’s methodology, according to Peter Dear, makes him ‘a
curious and novel exception’. Rob Iliffe agrees that the basic methodological principles
of Newton’s masterwork, the Principia, ‘went boldly against the grain of most
contemporary approaches to natural philosophy.’188 These judgments are borne out by
the confusion and controversy that greeted Newton’s first methodological
pronouncements in the early1670s.189
One of the chief differences between Newton’s methods and those of his
contemporaries in the Royal Society lies in Newton’s confidence that his procedure
would yield results that were virtually certain. Where his predecessors and peers had
tended to settle for probabilistic conclusions, Newton boldly sought mathematical
demonstrability, proceeding, in his own words, ‘in imitation of the method by wch
Mathematitians are wont to prove their doctrines.’190 Such a method would, in his
view, give rise to new kind of natural science that rejected ‘probabilities’ and was
‘supported by the greatest evidence’. 191 At the same time, Newton wished to present
himself an experimentalist, an identification associated with the very probabilism he
wished to avoid. This tension is nowhere better expressed that in the opening sentence
of the Opticks, where Newton announces his intention to ‘propose and prove’ the
188
Peter Dear, ‘Method and the Study of Nature’, Cambridge History of Seventeenth-Century
Philosophy I, 147-77 (166); Rob Iliffe, ‘Abstract considerations: disciplines and the incoherence
of Newton’s natural philosophy’, Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 35A (2004),
427-54 (446). Newton’s investigations of light, Iliffe adds, ‘represented a deliberate and
ambitious attempt to transform contemporary natural philosophy, and closer to home, the nature
of enquiry at the Royal Society.’ (437).
189
See, e.g., Hooke’s complaints, Isaac Newton’s Papers and Letters on Natural Philosophy,
ed. I. Bernard Cohen and Robert E. Schefield (Cambridge, MA, 1978), p. 111. See also Zev
Bechler, ‘Newton’s 1672 Optical Controversies: A Study in the Grammar of Scientific Dissent’,
in E. Yahuda (ed.), The Interaction between Science and Philosophy (Atlantic Highlands, NJ,
1974), pp. 115-142; Alan Gross, ‘On the Shoulders of Giants: Seventeenth-Century Optics as an
Argumentative Field’, in R. A. Harris (ed.), Landmark Essays on Rhetoric of Science (Marwah,
NJ, 1997), pp. 19-38.
190
Newton to Oldenburg, 21 September 1672, Correspondence, I, 237.
191
Newton, The Optical Papers of Isaac Newton, Vol. 1. The optical lectures 1670–1672, ed.
Alan Shapiro (Cambridge, 1984), I, 89.
CHAPTER 5. THE INSTAURATION OF LEARNING
69
properties of light ‘by Reason and Experiments’.192 This stance contrasted with the
more modest experimentalism of most of his compatriots. Sprat, for example, had
written earlier that the results of experiment must be reported not ‘as unalterable
Demonstrations, but as present appearances’.193 The proposed union of reason and
experiment suggested a greater faith in our rational capacities than most seventeenthcentury experimentalists had been willing to countenance. Indeed Newton’s
eighteenth-century legacy tended to split precisely along the lines of reason and
experiment. I. Bernard Cohen and George Smith rightly observe that Newton
engendered ‘two related but rather different traditions of doing science.’194 These were
those of the experimentalist and the mathematical theoretician.
Much of the apparent oddness of Newton’s approach arises out of his claim to be able to
treat the phenomena of light and gravity from both physical and mathematical points of
view. This particular combination of approaches, Newton believed, would enable him
to argue ‘more securely’ or with ‘certainty’.195 Historians of science now routinely
interpret Newton’s novelty as resulting from the (then) illicit introduction of the
methods of mixed mathematics into natural philosophy.196 Related to this disciplinary
transgression was Newton’s apparent assumption that he could practice a demonstrative
science while dispensing with the essentialism upon which such a procedure typically
192
Newton, Opticks: or, A Treatise of the Reflections, Refractions, Inflections & Colours of
Light, based on the 4th edn., ed. I. Bernard Cohen, et al. (New York, 1979), p. 1.
193
Sprat, History, p. 108.
194
I. Bernard Cohen and George E. Smith (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to Newton
(Cambridge, 2002), Introduction, p. 31. On tensions between the methods of the Opticks and
the Principia see George Smith, ‘The methodology of the Principia’, in Cambridge Companion
to Newton, pp. 138–173; P. Anstey, ‘The Methodological Origins of Newton’s Queries’, Studies
in History and Philosophy of Science 35A (2004), 247-69; P. Achinstein, ‘Newton’s
corpuscular query and experimental philosophy’, in Philosophical perspectives on Newtonian
science, ed. P. Bricker and R. I. G. Hughes, (Cambridge, MA, 1990), pp. 135–173; I. Bernard
Cohen, The Newtonian Revolution (Cambridge, 1980); J. E. McGuire, ‘Newton’s ‘Principles of
philosophy’: An intended Preface for the 1704 Opticks and a related draft fragment’, BJHS 5
(1970), 178–186
195
Newton, The Principia. Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy, tr. I. Bernard
Cohen and Anne Whitman (Berkeley, 1999), Bk. I, Sec. 11, Scholium. (p. 589); Definition 8 (p.
408). Newton to Oldenburg, 6 Feb 1676, Correspondence I, 96. On these features of Newton’s
method see McMullin, ‘Conceptions of Science in the Scientific Revolution’, in David Lindberg
and Robert Westman, Reappraisals of the Scientific Revolution (Cambridge, 1990), pp. 27-92,
esp. pp. 67-70.
196
See, e.g., Andrew Cunningham, ‘How the Principia got its Name: Or, Taking Natural
Philosophy Seriously,” History of Science 28 (1991), 377-92; ‘Getting the Game Right:
Some Plain Words on the Identity and Invention of Science’, Studies in History and
Philosophy of Science 19 (1998), 365-389; Peter Dear, ‘The Mathematical Principles of
Natural Philosophy: Toward a Heuristic Narrative for the Scientific Revolution’,
Configurations 6 (1998), 173-193.
CHAPTER 5. THE INSTAURATION OF LEARNING
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depended.197 We are now in a position to see a further source of apparent
inconsistency: Newton had combined two approaches—‘rationalist/ mathematical’ and
‘experimental’—that had arisen as distinct and arguably mutually inconsistent ways of
making knowledge in a fallen world. These approaches had been separated not only on
account of lingering Aristotelian prejudices about the separate subject matters of
mathematics and natural philosophy, but also because they were based on divergent
assessments of our post-lapsarian mental capacities. Small wonder, perhaps, that
Newton’s natural philosophy can be characterized as ‘incomprehensible’ and
‘incoherent’.198
Newton’s general approach to the question of method represents a significant point of
departure from what had come before. Rather than seeking foundations for knowledge,
as Bacon and Descartes had done, he sought ways of rendering the world intelligible by
whatever combination of approaches seemed to work. This meant (in addition to
seeking scientific knowledge in ancient texts and arcane alchemical practices)
exploiting both experimental and mathematical methods, even though each of these
approaches had originally been inspired by a quite different estimates of the capacities
of fallen human minds and of the intelligibility of the fallen world. What for others
would have amounted to an inconsistent combination of methods was possible for
Newton because he was not constrained by any specific theological doctrine of
epistemological incapacity. In other words, he had no interest in showing how his
method was consistent with a particular theological anthropology. His theological
concern lay elsewhere. As he famously wrote in the Opticks, by pursuing his method it
might be possible to ‘know by natural Philosophy what is the first Cause.’199 Given
that uncovering the designs of God was one of his principal objects, his approach to the
natural world could be said to be hermeneutical rather than epistemological. For this
reason he elaborated related sets of rules for the interpretation of scripture and the
197
Dear, ‘Method and the Study of Nature’, pp. 166-70.
Rob Iliffe, ‘Butter for parsnips: Authorship, audience and the incomprehensibility of the
Principia’, in M. Biagioli and P. Galison (eds.), Scientific authorship: Credit and intellectual
property in science (London, 2003), pp. 33–65.
199
Newton, Opticks, p. 405. Cf. ‘General Scholium’, Principia, p. 943; Keynes MS 7, fol. 1r.
For Newton’s commitment to natural theology see I. Bernard Cohen, ‘Isaac Newton’s Principia,
the Scriptures and the Divine Providence’, in Sidney Morgensbesser et al., (eds.), Philosophy,
Science and Method (New York, 1969), pp. 523-48; Michael Ben-Chaim, ‘The Discovery of
Natural Goods: Newton’s Vocation as an “Experimental Philosopher”’, BJHS 34 (2001), 395416; Stephen Snobelen, ‘To Discourse of God: Isaac Newton’s Heterodox Theology and his
Natural Philosophy’, in Science and Dissent in England, 1688-1945, ed. Paul Wood (Aldershot,
2004), pp. 39-65. Newton, however, was a more cautious natural theologian than many
Newtonians.
198
CHAPTER 5. THE INSTAURATION OF LEARNING
71
interpretation of nature.200 In pursuing these interpretative strategies Newton showed
himself to be interested less in re-establishing a lost dominion over nature than in
uncovering some underlying uniformity and intelligibility that would in turn point to the
power and wisdom of God.
The past few decades have seen a number of attempts to relate Newton’s heterodox
religious views to his natural philosophy.201 Certainly, the general point can be made
that Newton’s natural philosophical pursuits were at least partly motivated by his
religious convictions. This however, would also be true for most of his contemporaries,
and falls short of establishing a connection between specific religious convictions and
the content of natural philosophy. Some commentators have proposed a connection
between Newton’s extreme and heterodox monotheism and his apparent theological
voluntarism. Newton’s God is a God of dominion, who directly controls the creation
without the need for the second person of the Trinity mediating between God and his
creation.202 But as I have argued elsewhere Newton’s voluntarism is questionable and
in any case voluntarism is entirely consistent with Trinitarian theology.203 The
considerations set out above hint at a possible alternative way of connecting Newton’s
heterodoxy to his philosophy. It was Newton’s rejection of the deity of Christ that
indirectly led to his agnosticism about the fallen state of human nature. This in turn
enabled him to combine two methodological principles that arose of conflicting
theological anthropologies. The essentially ‘optimistic’ premises of mathematic natural
philosophy are brought together with the ‘pessimistic’ programme of experimental
philosophy in a way possibly only for someone lacking strong commitments to any of
the prevailing models of theological anthropology. This lack of interest in
anthropology—exceptional for his time—enabled him to construct an equally
200
On parallels between Newton’s biblical hermeneutics (his ‘Rules of Interpretation’) and his
natural philosophical method (‘rules of reasoning in philosophy’ in the Principia), see Stephen
Snobelen, ‘“God of gods, and lord of lords”: The theology of Isaac Newton's General Scholium
to the Principia’, Osiris16 (2001), 169-208; M. Mamiani, ‘The Rhetoric of Certainty: Newton's
Method in Science and in the Interpretation of the Apocalypse’, in Persuading Science, ed. M.
Pera and W. R. Shea (Canton, Ohio: Science History, 1991), pp. 157-72. Peter Redpath,
Masquerade of the Dream Walkers: Prophetic Theology from the Cartesians to Hegel
(Amsterdam: 1998), pp. 18f.; Scott Mandelbrote, ‘“A Duty of the Greatest Moment”: Isaac
Newton and the Writing of Biblical Criticism’, BJHS 26 (1993), 281-302.
201
Ayval Lesham, Newton on Mathematics and Spiritual Purity (Dordrecht, 2003); James E.
Force, ‘The Nature of Newton’s “Holy Alliance” between Science and Religion: From the
Scientific Revolution to Newton (and Back Again)’, in Osler (ed.), Rethinking the Scientific
Revolution, pp. 247-70. Snobelen, ‘To Discourse of God’.
202
See especially James Force, ‘Newton’s God of Dominion: The Unity of Newton’s
Theological, Scientific and Political Thought’, in Force and Popkin (eds.), Essays on Newton’s
Theology, pp. 75-102.
203
Harrison, ‘Was Newton a Voluntarist?’.
CHAPTER 5. THE INSTAURATION OF LEARNING
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exceptional natural philosophical method. So Newton’s theological heterodoxy did
inform his natural philosophy insofar as it enabled him to adopt more easily
methodologies that were ultimately incompatible with the more conventional
theological positions of his contemporaries.
*****
The state of human nature in light of the Fall was important for Boyle and Locke, even
though they tended to diminish its role as a significant inhibitor of learning. Ultimately
it is not important that Locke diverges from the strong view of inherited incapacity.
What is significant is that the prevalence of such a view within his social milieu forced
him to reflect critically on the mind and its limitations. And if he was eventually to
demur from the common view of the original causes of the debilitation of the mind, he
nonetheless affirmed the inherent weakness of the mind and the limited scope of its
reach. This is to say that his anthropology was consistent with what had been expressed
throughout the century. As he himself put it, what we were able to discover in ‘our
present condition’ with ‘dull and weak’ faculties, was rather modest: ‘We are able, by
our senses, to know and distinguish things; and to examine them so far, as to apply them
to our uses, and several ways to accommodate the exigencies of this life…. But it
appears not, that God intended we should have a perfect, clear, and adequate
knowledge.’204 In downplaying the significance of the Fall as an account of how we
came to be in this state, Locke was in essence ‘naturalizing’ our corrupt and weak
condition. Michael Losonsky rightly suggests that Locke’s strategy ‘was to accept the
curse as an unavoidable characteristic of human beings.’205 But however it
subsequently came to be theorized, this acceptance of the limitations of knowledge was
to become a crucial feature of modern experimental science, much of the success of
which relies upon the modesty of its ambitions and its capacity to ask the ‘small
question’. Equally, without the residual influence of the eschatological orientation of
the seventeenth-century Protestants, along with Calvinist notions of vocation, the
usefulness of earthly work, and the need to work gradually towards the human
transformation of the natural and social realms, this account of human nature might
have degenerated into a quiescent scepticism.
204
Locke, Essay, II.xxiii.12 (I, 402).
Michael Losonsky, ‘Locke on Meaning and Signification’, in G. A. J. Rogers (ed.), Locke’s
Philosophy: Content and Context (Oxford, 1996), pp. 123-142
205
CHAPTER 5. THE INSTAURATION OF LEARNING
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Newton’s approach signals a more significant departure from the original justifications
of experimental natural philosophy. But this is not a consequence of any diminution in
the significance of theological considerations in the sphere of natural philosophy.
Newton’s approach, along with that of Boyle, is indicative of gradual move away from
theological anthropology towards a more exclusive focus on physico-theology.206 The
capacity of both experimental and mathematical natural philosophy to provide evidence
of divine providence and design became more important than whether their respective
epistemological foundations were in accord with theological conceptions of human
nature. This development can be partly explained by the fact that one of the original
concerns of those advancing anthropological justifications of their methods had been to
critique the putatively naïve and uncritical methods of Aristotelianism, and do so within
a context of post-Reformation debates about the extent of the damage wrought by the
Fall. With experimental and mathematical methods now more secure, and
Aristotelianism less so, attention could be directed away from theological foundations
towards theological outcomes. The religious legitimacy of the new forms of knowledge
increasingly came to rest on their capacity to deliver a robustly theistic view of natural
world, rather than on whether their methods accorded with a quite specific conception
of human nature. Regarding the latter issue, it was also the case that the consensus that
had once existed amongst English Protestants on the nature and extent of original sin
was slowly dissolving. This is evident in the vigorous debates of the second half of the
century, in the rise of Socinianism, in Newton’s studious ignoring of the whole issue,
and in the fact that Boyle and Locke sought to move the problem of intellectual
incapacity out of the context of discussions of the Fall and into a more broad
metaphysical framework. Equally important is the fact that there is considerable tension
between arguments to the effect that divine design can be discerned in the natural world,
and claims that the world is fallen and that we have lost the capacity to interpret it. The
strong sense of the fallenness of human beings and their world that is characteristic of
Calvinism has often been accompanied by an ambivalence about natural theology or
even downright hostility towards it.207 The claim that design is evident in the world
assumes both the intelligibility of nature and our minds’ capacity to detect that
intelligibility. Both sit uneasily with a strong view of the Fall and its noetic
consequences. Already in Boyle we see that the pendulum has begun to swing away
from an emphasis on original sin towards physico-theology. This continues with
206
207
Israel, Radical Enlightenment, pp. 456-63.
The locus classicus for this tension is Rom. 1:20.
CHAPTER 5. THE INSTAURATION OF LEARNING
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Newton, although like Boyle, he was content to exploit an experimental method that
owed its origins to a theological position to which he no longer subscribed.
It is partly on account of Newton’s unparalleled achievements in the sphere of natural
philosophy that there has been a tendency for historians to view the theological
interactions between science and religion in seventeenth-century England in terms of
Newtonianism and subsequent eighteenth-century developments.208 This has meant that
the dominant theme in discussions of that relation has been the rise of physico-theology
and quest for evidence of design in nature. This vision has been broadened somewhat
by the work of Charles Webster and others, who have added the dimension of Protestant
eschatology to the picture. My contention has been there a vital third theological
component that has been consistently overlooked in these discussions. It is now time to
accord theological anthropology a significant place in the articulation and defence of
early modern experimental philosophy.
This is not to say that the difference between the two traditions brought into an uneasy
partnership by Newton were immediately forgotten. The divide between English
experimentalism and the more speculative approach of such Continental figures as
Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibniz was deep seated and remained a central feature of the
rhetoric of the respective camps. The latter thinkers, whose ‘rationalism’ is typically
contrasted with British ‘empiricism’, expressed considerable impatience with the mass
of observations and experiments demanded by the Baconian regimen, and were
disappointed by the modesty of the conclusions drawn from them.209 Leibniz,
presuming to speak for them all, complained that the Baconian method, as exemplified
by Boyle’s practice, was tedious, labour intensive, and ultimately insufficient to provide
the kind of certainty that genuine science required. In a lengthy but revealing passage
he expresses what he sees to be the essential difference between the respective
approaches:
The art of discovering the causes of phenomena, or genuine hypotheses, is like
that of deciphering: an inspired guess often provides a generous short-cut. Lord
Bacon started putting the art of experimenting into the form of rules, and the
Honourable Robert Boyle was a gifted practitioner of it. But unless we add to
208
This is equally true for issues of method which sometimes assume the existence of a
univocal Newtonian tradition. See Paul Wood, ‘Science, Philosophy and the Mind’, in Roy
Porter (ed.), The Cambridge History of Science IV, Eighteenth Century Science, pp. 800-24,
esp. p. 824.
209
Spinoza, Letter to Oldenburg, April 1662, Collected Works, I, 178. See also Israel, Radical
Enlightenment, pp. 253-6; M. B. Hall, Robert Boyle on Natural Philosophy, an essay with
CHAPTER 5. THE INSTAURATION OF LEARNING
75
that the art of using experiments and of drawing conclusions from them, we can
lay out a king's ransom and still achieve less than an acute thinker could
discover in a moment. M. Descartes, who certainly fits that description, said
something to the same effect in one of his letters, referring to the English
Chancellor's method. And Spinoza (whom I am quite prepared to quote when he
says something good) offered a similar reflection in one of his letters to the
Secretary of the Royal Society of England, the late Mr Oldenburg; it was
published among the posthumous works of that discerning Jew. He was
commenting on a work of Mr Boyle's, who, it must be said, does spend rather
too long on drawing from countless fine experiments no conclusion except one
which he could have adopted as a principle, namely that everything in nature
takes place mechanically - a principle which can be made certain by reason
alone, and never by experiments, however many of them one conducts.210
A natural philosophy based on ‘inspired guesses’, on what ‘an acute thinker could
discover in a moment’, and principles ‘made certain by reason alone’, as contrasted with
‘countless fine experiments’ amounts to a significant difference over the powers of the
mind, or at the very least, the causes of its propensity for error. This, in turn, may be
attributed to a different reading of Adam’s incapacity following his Fall—one that
insists that fallen human minds still retain something of their access to divine ideas. As
we have seen, by the end of the seventeenth century the explicit theological
justifications for experimentation were already being written out of accounts of
scientific method. Nonetheless, the divide between the methods of inspired guesswork
and experimentation persisted. In the middle of the eighteenth century David Hume,
who had little time for the doctrines of the Fall and original sin, would still defend
English experimentalism against the ‘other scientific method’ in terms of the former
being more in keeping with the imperfections of human nature. In a passage from his
Enquiry into the Principles of Morals (1751) he nicely sets out the key issues:
… we can only expect success, by following the experimental method, and
deducing general maxims for a comparison of particular instances. The other
scientific method, where a general abstract principle is first established, and is
afterwards branched out into a variety of inferences and conclusions, may be
more perfect in itself, but suits less the imperfection of human nature and is a
common source of illusion….211
selections from his writings (Bloomington, 1966), p. 43.
210
Leibniz, New Essays on Human Understanding IV.12, (p. 454). For Spinoza’s letter see
Collected Works I, 182.
211
David Hume, An Enquiry into the Principles of Morals, ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge, 3rd edition
revised by P. H. Nidditch (Oxford, 1975), p. 174.
CHAPTER 5. THE INSTAURATION OF LEARNING
76
Notably absent from Hume’s remarks is reference to a theological account of human
imperfection. In time, even the more general theme of cognitive limitation was to
disappear from such methodological reflections, and the last traces of the theological
origins of this approach were erased. Henceforth, experimentation will present itself as
a central and relatively unproblematic feature of modern science.